Bad services cost more to deliver than good ones. It would be tempting (and easier) to write an opening blog for NCSW24 around all the innovation, enabling technology and hope that we in the industry see around improving customer experience. But if we stand in the shoes of our customers (especially citizens consuming public services) then we must realise, that from their perspective, we are at a real low.
Earlier this year Claer Barrett from the Financial Times (with data and insights from Jo Causon at the ICS) published some shocking figures showing citizen satisfaction with public services.
Unless we take stock of our situation, and channel our own anger and frustration to improvement, then nothing is going to change.
At GovMetric we work with public service providers across many sectors – and garner data and community insights to inform change and improvement.
If we drill down into the lowest performing of the above service areas, Housing, the picture gets worse as we dig deeper.
Not only are we “cheesing off” customers, we are also stressing out front line staff, and we are providing service in hugely inefficient ways.
Using data from Housemark and the Housing Ombudsman, we can start to understand the citizen (tenant) journey in more detail.
Meanwhile at the other end of the tenant journey when we measure subsequent complaints we see this (data by Housing Ombudsman) 👇
Doing the maths over this period indicates a 1% reduction in satisfaction correlates to a 5.4% increase in complaints.
Bad service is costing us a fortune in complaints – and that’s before we even start to look at Failure Demand.
What’s even worse is the outcomes of these numbers. All the below headlines happened when satisfaction and complaints were higher than they are now.
The most shocking of all these in recent times has been Grenfell. We can’t talk about social housing without talking about Grenfell. We first became aware of the systemic failure after reading Peter Apps book: "Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen".
Hundreds of things went wrong over the years at Grenfell. But the single biggest foundational failure for me was Culture – it enabled all the other failures to happen.
If we were to ask today, what do we need to put things right – Cash or Culture? Give me Culture every time.
The best answer of course (if possible) would be both – but cash would without culture change will fail.
The new government is settling in, they are talking change, and they are deliberately holding back on cash at the moment until sustainable GDP growth comes through.
Lets take advantage of this moment. Lets start challenging our cultural inertia, Lets start tuning into our citizens and their experiences – and start understanding them better.
In todays data driven world lets start gathering the data – to inform change and improvement.
If you would like to discover some of our Customer Stories, highlighting real-world customer experience transformations within the public sector, click below.
Nic Streatfeild is the CEO and Founder of GovMetric, home of the leading Citizen Experience Management solution for the public sector.
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