Customer-Centered Government: Objectives
As pressure mounts on government agencies to sustain customer-focused or citizen-centered ways of operating despite tightening budgets, agency managers are struggling to find the right methods to respond to the challenge. Unfortunately, traditional private sector approaches to customer satisfaction rarely succeed when adopted by government. Whether they be overly simplistic customer service programs, empty slogans (the customer is always right?) or industrial-age concepts based on building quality, defect-free widgets; they fail to address the real challenges government managers face:
- In many cases multiple customers have competing interests and it is not always clear who the actual customer is.
- We don’t manufacture widgets. Government services are often hard to get your arms around. Consequently our measures may be difficult to interpret and problems harder to identify and improve.
- Our customers didn’t choose us, they have to use us, and there is nowhere else they can go. Therefore, there is no competitive incentive to improve customer satisfaction.
- What the customer says they want may not be what they actually need.
In addition, government organizations often function with bureaucratic rules and regulations, counterproductive measurement systems and conflicting stakeholder interests. All of these issues are compounded when the agency is of a regulatory or compliance nature.
This fast paced, hands-on workshop delves right into these issues and presents proven techniques government managers can use to dramatically improve customer satisfaction. In this engaging presentation you will learn:
- The technique that forever eliminates the “we don’t make widgets” problem
- How to clear the mental hurdle that keeps most government organizations from improving customer satisfaction
- How to identify the most important customer in any situation
- How to balance competing customer interests
- How to proactively improve customer satisfaction — knowing exactly what they want before you give it to them
- The magic questions to ask customers to always find out what they want
- How to objectively measure customer satisfaction in real-time and link them to a balanced scorecard
- A systematic way to develop innovative solutions for your customers
- How to increase responsiveness to customers by dramatically improving processes