Main navigation

Strategy (continued)

Citizen and Business Centred Services

22.  Services need to be designed around citizens and businesses to ensure effectiveness of delivery to the customer, to achieve policy goals, and to release savings by reducing duplication and streamlining processes (customer satisfaction, though important, is not the only goal). The key actions required are

• to increase understanding of customer needs and behaviours;
• to define customer groups and appoint directors to lead the overall development of services to those groups;
• to create a Service Transformation Board to define and enforce common service design principles; and
• to develop modern channels and manage the migration to them.

The following paragraphs expand on these.

Systematically engage with citizens, business and front-line public servants to understand and then specify the transformational changes which service providers need to meet - learning from the best practice already within the public sector, from other governments and from the private sector.

23.  For public services the Prime Minister has set out clear principles of reform - national standards, devolution of delivery, flexibility in service provision and greater customer choice. Basing services on what the customer wants and needs is crucial to technology-enabled public service transformation. Some parts of the public sector have developed mechanisms for measuring customer response to particular services. However customer insight and market intelligence is not shared systematically across government. Unlike some other national governments, the UK has no regular, holistic and publicised assessment of customers and their experience of public services. To modernise services government needs a systematic view of what citizens, businesses and front line staff want and need.

24.  Government will therefore implement new processes to engage with citizens, businesses and public servants to research technology enabled services, as well as co-ordinating and sharing existing customer and front line research. The aim is to bring a strong and reliable customer voice into the design of individual services; and (at a more general level) to get a better understanding of the service expectations of citizens, businesses and public servants. The recent announcement by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster of ways to measure customer satisfaction is part of this.

25.  The needs of key groups - such as older people - are best viewed in the round rather than service by service. So part of this work will be to help define the customer groups. These are where citizens or businesses expect, or where social and policy outcomes require, joined-up and consistent presentation, access to and delivery of all relevant government services. This will be a complex picture: people rarely fall neatly into categories, so services needs to be responsive enough to deal with the fact that individuals often associate themselves with different groups at different times depending on their particular need.

Appoint "Customer Group Directors" for particular groups of the citizen/business population to lead the design of services, working to Ministerial leadership.

26.  To lead the transformation of groups of services to customers, especially for those which cut across organisational boundaries, the Government will appoint Customer Group Directors, each reporting to one Minister responsible for that customer group. Key responsibilities of a Customer Group Director will be to sponsor customer insight and research into the needs of that customer group; to lead the design of services including overall channel planning, joining-up of presentation and delivery, branding and communication, and service improvements; to track and communicate performance against customer related targets; and to represent the interests of their customers as necessary in existing inter-departmental governance and in the governance of this strategy.

27.  To start the process off, and in parallel with the further research, the Government will initially appoint Directors for one citizen group (e.g. older people), one policy group (e.g offender management), and one business group (e.g farmers). These initial appointees will help develop the role, including its own accountability and any necessary adjustments to the accountabilities of others, its relationship with local government, and the resources and governance necessary. Other appointments will follow in due course once these new roles have been thus defined in more detail and the first phase of the research work is complete. Early candidates will include Directors for parents and for small businesses.

28.  These appointments should normally be people already leading a major service line, and each Customer Group Director would create a "Customer Group Team" from the key public and voluntary sector bodies which serve the customer group and from the relevant marketing, research and communication groups.

Create a Service Transformation Board whose role is to set overarching service design principles, promote best practice, signpost the potential from technology futures and challenge inconsistency with agreed standards

29.  In order to steer and co-ordinate the work of Customer Group Directors and others, the Government will set up a Service Transformation Board of officials from the wider public sector who run major services and have operational delivery responsibility. The Cabinet Office will provide the secretariat and design authority for the Board under a Service Transformation Director.

30.  The role of this board is to set overall operational strategy and its policy framework and focus on the practical mechanisms to deliver service transformation. In particular, it will set overarching service design principles; promote best practice; signpost the potential of technology; identify common design and development needs; and challenge inconsistency or deviation from agreed standards or best practice.

Develop modern channels for citizen and business access to services, and actively manage the shift in channels towards the most efficient and effective.

31.  Customers expect simple access to services, with an appropriate, efficient choice of consistent entry points and with seamless handovers across the channels - for instance between telephone and internet.

32.  Historically government services depended almost entirely on form-filling and face to face meetings. Over the next decade, the principal preferred channels for the delivery of information and transactional services will be the telephone, internet and mobile channels - as well as the increasingly important channels within the digital home. Using customer insight, government will drive take-up of the best new digital channels and exploit mobile technologies; and it will innovate its services to take swift advantage of new technologies as they emerge.

33.  To improve efficiency, effectiveness and customer value, action is required to improve government's use of these channels, including:

1. There are at least 130 major call centres in central government alone. Government's call centres will be rationalised, building on the work already done by the National Audit Office and many local authorities.
2. Consideration of a single national public service number for non-emergency services as has been successful in New York (311) and is being introduced in France and the Netherlands. The development of a Single Non Emergency Number service between the Home Office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, involving local authorities and police force partnerships and currently focusing on non-emergency policing, crime and anti-social behaviour, could be the foundation for this service.
3. There are currently over 2500 government websites. To ensure that overall the government uses the web most effectively to support its service delivery and communications strategies, the web presence of government will be rationalised. For each government organisation the number of different web sites it uses will be reduced and consistency introduced in line with its overall communications strategy. For customer information, self-service transactions and campaign support, services will converge on DirectGov and Business Link as the primary on-line entry points; service-specific or stand-alone solutions will be phased out.
4. To improve access for people on the move or without fixed phone lines a step-change will be made in the use of mobile phones and other mobile devices to exchange information and transact directly with citizens and front line staff.
5. Improvement in the use of search to access the government's web information, including exploring the potential for co-branded solutions with major search providers. This will learn from the way people now use the wider internet.
6. Innovation with broadcasters and other content and infrastructure providers on the potential opportunity for delivering service directly to people's homes, further fuelled by the digital switchover in broadcasting.
7. Giving citizens online access to their records and data held by government, mirroring existing rights and reducing the cost of handling simple enquiries.

34.  Overall government should steer citizens and businesses to the lowest cost channels consistent with meeting policy objectives and customer acceptability. At an appropriate time, legacy channels should be closed (as the Department for Work and Pensions has recently achieved through its benefit payment modernisation programme) unless there are compelling policy reasons that cannot be achieved by other means.

35.  During the migration period services should increasingly be designed on business models based round electronic service delivery. Substantial efficiency savings cannot be released while services essentially convert electronic transactions into paper ones for internal processing. So the reverse should apply: electronic transactions should be the norm, and paper transactions processed by front-line staff or intermediaries electronically.

36.  Customer Group Directors should take the lead in determining the overall channel strategy for their customer group, including use of intermediaries, other parts of government, local providers and the voluntary and community sector, and agree implementation of that strategy with relevant service providers.

37.  Sometimes the benefit to society of dealing with government online is not clear. Customer Group Directors and public service providers should also promote responsible channel choice by telling people how much use of more efficient channels saves and what that saving could achieve in terms of reinvestment elsewhere in the public services.

38.  The experience which has already been gained by innovative government services in incentivising and managing channel shift is sometimes overlooked. The Service Transformation Board should collate experience and research within and outside government, and produce guidance for Customer Group Directors and public service providers.