Trust and local government
Trust in local government is widely felt to be declining. But what do we mean by trust, how do people form trusting relationships, and how can public service organisations realistically develop more of those relationships?
If Demos did call centres...
12:19pm Tuesday, 18th July 2006
The work we're doing on trust and service design at the moment has got me thinking - we seem to have developed a terrible habit of 'improving' public services in ways that actually harm people's experiences of them. Just look at local government over the past five or six years - the Audit Commission says services have improved significantly, but there's not much evidence that the public has noticed.
I think this is about the call centre problem. You outsource your customer contact services, put them all in one place, make them slicker, faster and cheaper. But you also plunge people into a world of automatic menus, targets for call times and staff who can only do what comes up on the screen.
The service is better than what was there before - more queries sorted more quickly and lower cost - but what's the point if the public hates it? The phrase 'the computer won't let me do that' immediately leads to the response: 'can I speak to a manager please?'
How would you organise a call centre if you were interested in building trust and satisfaction? You'd start by giving people who contact you a direct line to a named member of staff who they could always call - essentially a case manager. You'd trust the case manager to solve the problems they're faced with - empowering them to do whatever's necessary. And you'd make sure people who called in were informed personally when their enquiry was dealt with. Finally, you'd give people easy ways to get out of automatic menus if they wanted to.
The other thing you'd do is recognise that a call centre is a hub of customer intelligence - you'd look for ways to use the contact you had with the public to map local information about concerns, needs and perceptions of services and the council.
Are there call centres like this out there? I'd love to find one and see if the theory actually works.
I think this is about the call centre problem. You outsource your customer contact services, put them all in one place, make them slicker, faster and cheaper. But you also plunge people into a world of automatic menus, targets for call times and staff who can only do what comes up on the screen.
The service is better than what was there before - more queries sorted more quickly and lower cost - but what's the point if the public hates it? The phrase 'the computer won't let me do that' immediately leads to the response: 'can I speak to a manager please?'
How would you organise a call centre if you were interested in building trust and satisfaction? You'd start by giving people who contact you a direct line to a named member of staff who they could always call - essentially a case manager. You'd trust the case manager to solve the problems they're faced with - empowering them to do whatever's necessary. And you'd make sure people who called in were informed personally when their enquiry was dealt with. Finally, you'd give people easy ways to get out of automatic menus if they wanted to.
The other thing you'd do is recognise that a call centre is a hub of customer intelligence - you'd look for ways to use the contact you had with the public to map local information about concerns, needs and perceptions of services and the council.
Are there call centres like this out there? I'd love to find one and see if the theory actually works.
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A few points:
- What do you do if a client's case manager is on holiday? Or has 3 of their clients in a hold queue already? The obvious answer is re-direct the client to another agent, but in order for quality of service not to be affected you'd have to ensure that the case manager keeps all notes in the central database - in which case there's little point in allocating personal case managers anyway. This is also the point which renders Natwest's "you can call your branch" pitch useless.
- A good call centre application (and I admit not all of them are good) will give an agent as much freedom as possible, but not everyone can be a specialist in all areas. Plus in order to apply business rules consistently the system must provide guidance - that's why the computer won't let them do that.
- The only thing worse for customer experience than a touchtone menu is being passed from agent to agent, which is what would happen if some segmentation wasn't done before you get to a real person.
If you're interested in best practice in public sector call centres, have a look at the DWP's Pension Transformation Programme - it includes some of the elements you mention, and has as its goal your vision of insightful, joined-up local and centralised services for the nation's pensioners.
I'm just about to dial my fourth number - most systems just chuck me out to a very pleasant woman in Mumbai who can't answer my question.
I'm sick of vivaldi, I'm sick of touch tone menus. I just want someone who can solve my problem. How hard can it be? Sure the system is efficient from the view of the train companies, but only because I have to do all the work of finding the right person to talk to.
Ah, but they do have a very good website... http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service_bulletins/today.html
The trust aim only enters consideration if the costs are limited or can be externalised. Generally, what you get is a 'mission statement' for trust with an implementation that allows a claim to trust that cannot be disproven. This gives the company the good press in relation to trust without the true implementation.