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For the past nine years, Accenture has been conducting leadership research to help public service organizations around the world serve citizens better.
Through our previous Leadership in Customer Service studies, we saw how governments took initial, tentative steps by publishing information online in the late 1990s.
For instance, they increased their efforts in early years of the present century, moving more individualized services and service transactions online. They have upped their efforts again in recent years, expanding their perspective to fulfill their aim to provide truly citizen-centric, integrated, one-stop services as well as to build citizens’ trust in government through better service delivery and content.
In our latest report, Leadership in Customer Service: Creating Shared Responsibility for Better Outcomes, we identified a new imperative for governments to move beyond a focus on service transactions to develop a new kind of relationship with citizens. This relationship should foster deeper trust; improve relevance and transparency of government decision making; improve service design and delivery; and transform the relationship between public services and customers/citizens from one of dependency to one of shared responsibility.
What makes an organization a leader in customer service? To find out, Accenture conducted 40 interviews with senior government officials throughout Europe, North America and Asia. We also completed secondary research in 21 countries, compiled six case studies in various countries and surveyed 8,600 citizens in person.
All this research tells us what’s happening now with customer relations in governments around the world. It also shows what practices help organizations move toward achieving high performance in customer services and delivery.
Through comprehensive, global research of government organizations, Accenture concluded that there are four key "enabling practices” to create opportunities for true customer service transformation. When applied, they close the gap between expectations and reality, promote the virtuous circle of trust between government and citizens and move toward shared responsibility for better outcomes. These four enabling practices are:
Governments make bold promises to citizens and are trying to fundamentally change how they structure and deliver services to them. However, evidence from this year’s citizen survey shows that governments are not fully delivering on these promises.
In most countries surveyed, the majority of people do not rate their government highly in delivering on this key mission: to provide customer-friendly services that contribute to a better quality of life for the people they serve.
What must happen to change citizen sentiment? First, governments should achieve the four enabling practices described and discussed in the full report. They should also move the customer service focus beyond the quality of the service transaction toward a relationship with citizens that fosters deeper trust, improves the relevance and transparency of government decision making, improves service design and delivery, and encourages a “coproductive” relationship based on shared responsibility.
Clearly, these are complex aspirations that will take time for governments to put into practice. However, we know that not achieving these goals will lead to eroding public confidence with government and to poor public services. Alternatively, implementing these practices will lead to the services citizens deserve, achieve high performance for government organizations and improve public value.
2007 Leadership in Customer Service Report: Delivering on the Promise
2006 Leadership in Customer Service Report: Building the Trust
2005 Leadership in Customer Service Report: New Expectations, New Experiences
January 13, 2009