"Organisations who know what their customers need and manage to deliver that again and again succeed. They succeed not just because satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal customers, but because they are also more likely to recommend the service to others. They succeed because satisfied customers are cheaper to serve and much nicer to deal with, and because personal recommendation is one of the most powerful influences on a potential customer. Understanding citizens in this way is something which government can no longer ignore. Demographic changes and social disengagement make large numbers of the public harder to reach. Driven by global competition, advances in technology and the offerings of leading commercial players have raised the standard of what constitutes an acceptable level of service. If we want our services to be used and our interventions to succeed, we need to meet the public on their terms and manage expectations more clearly along the way." 1
"Organisations who know what their customers need and manage to deliver that again and again succeed. They succeed not just because satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal customers, but because they are also more likely to recommend the service to others. They succeed because satisfied customers are cheaper to serve and much nicer to deal with, and because personal recommendation is one of the most powerful influences on a potential customer.
Understanding citizens in this way is something which government can no longer ignore. Demographic changes and social disengagement make large numbers of the public harder to reach. Driven by global competition, advances in technology and the offerings of leading commercial players have raised the standard of what constitutes an acceptable level of service. If we want our services to be used and our interventions to succeed, we need to meet the public on their terms and manage expectations more clearly along the way." 1
Knowledge is the cornerstone for developing insight about customers. Analysing why customers use certain services, the levels of use and the channels customers choose to gain access to those services, contribute towards customer insight knowledge. This knowledge can feed into channel optimisation and lead to meaningful measurement of customer satisfaction, service quality and strategic outcomes. Customer insight information can be gained by segmenting the customer base into groups that share distinguishing characteristics. These segments can be defined by different criteria such as:
Now esd-toolkit supports analysis of customer demand for services, as defined by the Local Government Services List (LGSL) - defining UK local authority citizen facing services - and channel (LGChL) - defining the means (web, phone, face to face, etc) by which services are accessed.
esd-toolkit maps local demographic profiles (unique to each participating council) against esd-toolkit’s extensive list of services delivered to customers. Through automated or semi-automated means, councils are outputting transactional data to the esd-toolkit so that demographic profiles are identified by volume and channel of access against each service (web, telephone and face-to-face are examples of access channels). From this process, councils are able to find out which demographic profiles are using what services and, for each service delivered, current customer channel preferences and the cost of servicing channel preferences.
See:
E-mail Sheila.Apicella@esd.org.uk for more details of the Customer Profiling Project.