How to build public trust and confidence
This appears to be a hot topic in local and central government. Whilst it is generally agreed that this is a sound objective the challenge is how and where to start.
In 2002 the Local Government Act repositioned local authorities away from autonomous and discreet deliverers of services and towards responsive, collaborative facilitators of community outcomes. This is similar to the move in the commercial world from being product oriented to becoming more customer-focused.
At last year’s Local Government New Zealand Conference, Harvard University’s Professor of Government, Michael Sandel alluded to the consultative requirements of the Local Government Act. He said that the purpose of consultation is “to deliver services better, to make government work better, to be more efficient, more responsive, and figure out what people in the communities want and need.” He also said that implicit in the idea of consultation with communities is “promoting, fostering a richer kind of citizenship and of civic engagement.”
“The more an organisation knows about their customers, the better they can service their needs. Local authorities have customers, both residents and businesses, just like any other business. They also tend to have quite a lot of data about their customers that they could be using to better understand them, enhance the way they are communicating with them and identify operational improvement opportunities that will help build public trust and confidence,” says Melanie Archibald of Datamine.
Practical places to start…
If you have data in lots of different department databases, you can pool this data to get a single view of your customers without the time or cost involved in changing your internal systems. Once the data is in place and the quality is OK you can analyse it to help you better understand your entire relationship with your customers. You would learn more about their level of engagement like how many council services do they use and how often? This could be used to increase usage of council services by creating targeted awareness and membership drive communications. You could learn how they communicate with you and how often, which could influence future communication plans. You could increase payment compliance by better understanding who does and doesn’t pay their bills on time, how long it takes them to pay, how they pay and what your non-payers are like. You could identify people who have recently moved into the area and develop proactive welcome communications to let them know about the services nearest them and other key information like what day their rubbish and recycling will be picked up and what time they should make sure it is ready. These are just some of the types of things you could find out.
The way your customers feel about you often relates to their experience interacting with you via one or more of your touch points. Word-of-mouth and customer perception play a big role in public trust and confidence. Each interaction is as important as the next. Like most customers, you are likely to be judged by their last interaction with you. Customer touch points are simply the way in which you currently interact with your customers like your service centre, website, ratepayer notifications, and community newsletter and events. One of the primary touch points for many local authorities is their call centre. With hundreds or thousands of calls coming in to your call centre every week this presents an excellent opportunity to get to know your customers better by leveraging the data you already have.
Your IT team or CRM / Call Centre system may already be tracking the number of inbound calls, duration of calls and how long it takes to resolve what they are calling about. You may even know the most common call types like rates / fee notice queries. But do you really know what prompted them to call, how many other people have called about the same issue over time (not just within a week), who is calling and what they are like, and who the most frequent callers are? Often the nuggets of gold are trapped in the free-text notes your call centre staff type into your database. The good news is that it is possible to mine this data and use the insights to get closer to your customers and identify and drive operational improvements that will help build public trust and confidence.
For example, you may receive multiple calls from households in the same area regarding water pressure – perhaps there is a problem with the pipes in that area. By addressing this you can reduce the number of repeat calls and the cost associated with handling those calls. You will also increase the satisfaction of those customers and build their trust and confidence by fixing the problem.
One more example, you may receive lots of calls soon after your rate notifications are sent from people who have automatic payments set-up. Analysing the notes tells you that they have called because they are confused and want to make sure the automatic payment is working OK. You could change the rate notification to reduce confusion and related calls. This will have a positive fiscal impact by avoiding unnecessary calls; it will also be better for your customers.
Melanie says “leveraging the information you already have in your existing data enables you to get closer to your customers, improve the way you manage and communicate with them, identify operational improvement opportunities and help build public trust and confidence by improving the customer experience.”