Customer Insight

Welcome to the community space for all those with a special interest in customer insight.

This site will help you to find the latest news, views, expertise, discussion and information in this key area and will provide links to other useful sources of information and contact with those involved in policy and strategy as well as direct access to experts, practitioners and initiatives currently developing and delivering real, practical solutions for this very important agenda.

(see useful links, contacts, forums, resources in the menu)

Delivering effective customer services is vitally important for any organisation, but even more so for local government which is intent not only on service improvement and modernisation, but also on improving customer satisfaction whilst meeting increasing expectations.

Even more challenges are immediately ahead if you are to transform service delivery to offer choice and deliver personalised services designed round customer needs. You will be required to base-line your existing services, measure and manage the volumes of service requests, manage the relationship between front and back offices, identify customer segmentation and preferred channels of contact, whilst at the same time reducing costs and expenditure.

You will also be required to take the lead in shaping service delivery in your community and to work with others to deliver services in partnership to improve the customer journey and to reach and provide services to the disengaged and the excluded in your community. To do this you will need to identify which partners are involved in service delivery, how they are involved, and exchange up-to-date service information and data with them.

In this ever changing environment you will also need to manage the impact of internal and external change across your partnerships on service delivery.

esd-toolkit has come a long way from when it was originally developed by local government for managing and measuring progress in e-government.

The toolkit can now help you improve your understanding of your own organisation, all the services it provides, and your relationships with your particular partner organisations.

The toolkit can help you manage and understand your service delivery, by enabling you to:

• have a 360° corporate understanding of the services you deliver and how those services are delivered
• understand your customers and their needs - personalising their service delivery when required
• develop a joined up understanding of customer experience across the organisation and partnership boundaries
• co-ordinate and manage the development of services across all access channels
• collate data and information from across your organisation and from partners
• share and develop up-to-date information and processes
• baseline, compare and evidence your service delivery objectively
• present the big picture of costs, efficiency, delivery and improvement

The specific resources to help you do this include:

• a common, independent infrastructure providing the common standards, business data sharing framework and communications tools that can easily be rolled out to any service area or individual
• dynamic real-time dashboards to show and share the latest performance information
• a detailed list of services and standards tailored to your organisation, based on national standards creating the "common language" to join-up local government and connect it with other public sector organisations
• an extensive list of reports, and data uploads and downloads using common formats (csv and xml) for transfer into spreadsheets, intranets and other corporate management tools
• an extensive archive of best practice, lessons learned, user experience and shared business processes
• a facilitated, connected community of more than 10,000 colleagues from all disciplines including performance management, customer services, and an increasing number of other public sector organisations

Toolkit is continuously developed and enhanced by local government practitioners to reflect the changes in how services are provided locally and nationally, to provide the information and knowledge you need to respond to these challenges effectively.

Adopting this approach will prepare the ground work for necessary and planned business management and for the national reporting obligations to central government expected to be necessary from 2008.