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Customer focus and community engagement


Introduction

Public sector managers can make a real difference to people's lives. But a genuine interest in customer focus and community engagement is essential if you are going to improve public services in your area.

You ignore customers at your peril. If you fail to consider their views and experiences when drawing up plans you run the risk that services will not offer value for money or meet local needs.

The good news is that community engagement will help you avoid this pitfall. It will allow your organisation to ensure that the priorities of local people are woven into the strategy and decision-making process.

Being able to demonstrate customer focus and effective methods of community engagement are a necessary condition of excellence and will help you to achieve rcognition for improvement.

Customer focus and community engagement are key drivers to improving public services. Without focusing on customers, services will not offer value for money or not meet local needs. Community engagement helps the organisation ensure that the priorities of local people translate into strategy and decision making. Both customer focus and community engagement have similar common enablers, which are outlined within this theme.

For service and corporate managers, being able to demonstrate a customer focus together with effective techniques for community engagement can help services to achieve recognition for improvement, as well as being a necessary condition of excellence. Public sector managers can make a difference to people’s lives.



What do we mean by customer focus?

Being customer focused means providing services that are useful and relevant for your existing and potential customers. It reflects the culture of a service and an organisation that aims to find out what is important to their customers. It also means that people are offered choice in the type of services that are being provided for them and the way in which services are provided.

If your service is customer focused the needs of your customers will drive it. You may feel that you already know what these needs are. If not, you will need to discover what it is that your customers expect and try to address these expectations where possible.

It may be easier to understand your existing customers because you will know who they are. By fully and accurately assessing need you will be able to identify who your potential customers are.

Customers vary according to the type of service being used or needed. However, the same customers can use more than one service, so understanding all their service interactions is important. For example:

  • children in care: social services, education services, transport services, leisure services
  • elderly people in nursing homes: social services, health services, benefits services
  • library users: transport services, library services, culture services
  • asylum seekers: social services, housing services, health services
  • students: transport services, leisure services, education services

The Office for Government Commerce (OGC) outline that a customer focused service should:

  • understand its customers
  • ensure its structures and operations are geared towards customers
  • manage its relationships with customers and accept feedback
  • develop and improve its service based on the knowledge it has of its customers


What do we mean by community engagement?

Communities can mean different things to different people. For those who carry responsibility for public services, engaging with the community means ensuring that everyone in their local area is given the opportunity to comment on the services provided for them and on the organisation’s priorities.

Engagement needs to be meaningful for people to become involved. A poor, personal experience of this can leave people feeling disempowered and not trusting their public service provider. It is therefore vital for all public service providers to be seen to be open and more accessible to local people. The Audit Commission’s report on corporate governance looks at how having effective corporate governance structures and processes in place can help improve public trust in your organisation.

Access the full: Audit Commission Corporate Governance report (PDF, 52 pages, 1,123 KB).

Joint working between local agencies is very important as partners work together to deliver the priorities of the community. Partners can work together to:

  • ensure their priorities are those of the community
  • reduce consultation fatigue
  • share information about customers and communities
  • improve quality of life and services for local people

Organisations differ in a number of ways (for example type, size, services provided, rural/urban). In terms of community engagement, one size will not fit all. Organisations will need to be innovative in how they engage with their community. There is a relationship between the resources that are made available for community engagement and the ability to be innovative and creative. Not everyone will want to engage in the same way so having different options is crucial.



How do customer focus and community engagement link to improvement?

The main purpose of focusing on your customers and engaging with the local community is to improve the public services you offer and the quality of life in your area.

Local public service providers are also under pressure to demonstrate how they have improved the efficiency of their services. One way of doing this is to review what your organisation is currently providing, and then being clear about what you should be delivering, based on an understanding of local need and taking into account wastage that can be eliminated and potential efficiency gains. This approach also ensures that organisations are clear about who they are providing services for, and why and how they are providing them.

Customers who rely on services will have a different view of their value for money compared with a local tax payer who has never used them. Organisations have to make value for money judgements based on the overall package of resources available, their statutory obligations and the needs and aspirations that they have identified among local people.

By being customer focused and engaging with the community your council can provide the most appropriate services for your customers with the finite resources at your disposal. Being close to and engaging with your community will help local people to be aware of the limits of your resources and the tough decisions you may need to take. It is also important that if you decide not to provide a particular service you communicate the reasons for your decisions.

As a service provider, you need to consider not just what is affordable, but also which interventions will have the biggest impact on the quality of life of your service users. For example, if you provide a meals-on-wheels service that offers nutritious food and also allows time for the member of staff to talk to the customer and provide some company for them, this will offer health and wellbeing benefits in addition to being an excellent service.

Local councils, and their partners, should involve their communities in decision making. As a result, suggestions, complaints and other feedback from local people and service users should be at the heart of your authority's decisions about improving your services.



Further information and top tips

Choice

Choice is very important to customers and all organisations should look at the range of choices that they can offer. Inevitably there are limits to the options that can be made available from the public purse, but, by understanding your customers better, your council can plan for choice and communicate more clearly how and why decisions have been made. Choices can be made on an individual basis or collectively with a community.

The New Local Government Network has produced a report, focused on local government services, which outlines for managers the conditions that need to be in place for enhancing choice. summary (PDF, 10 pages, 219 KB) is available. The Audit Commission has also published a paper (PDF, 12 pages, 76 KB) exploring the issues around choice in public services.

Community cohesion

As well as engaging with your community your council needs to ensure that it is bringing together the different groups of people who make up your local community so that they can understand each others strengths, needs and differences.

Improvements to housing and the environment, crime reduction and tackling anti-social behaviour have knock-on effects that can contribute positively to community cohesion. Staff working for good services will be clear about how they can and do contribute to community cohesion within the organisation’s overall strategy.

Access the following resources from the IDeA:

Top tips

Top tips for improving your customer focus and current community engagement:

  • take a corporate approach to customer contact and ensure you have consistency in customer focus across all services
  • find out what other services your customers are using
  • don’t reinvent the wheel – use existing information about customers and communities and share it across services
  • work with partners to improve and share information you hold and reduce unnecessary duplication when gathering it
  • don’t miss opportunities. Always leave a hook for people to feedback or become involved if they can


Publications and links

Below are some quick links to documents which may help you and your authority as you strive to improve your customer focus and community engagement:



Local Government White Paper: October 2006

Communities and improvement to customer service are core to the aims set out in: 'Strong and Prosperous Communities', the Local Government White Paper. The summary document states the following:

'People no longer accept the 'one size fits all' service models of old. They want choice over the services they receive, influence over those who provide them, and higher service standards. We want this to be the case everywhere – for people to be given more control over their lives; consulted and involved in running services; informed about the quality of services in their area; and enabled to call local agencies to account if services fail to meet their needs.'

Going forward, the Improvement Network will disseminate any guidance and tools available to promote more effective delivery of services.

Access the full version of 'Strong and Prosperous Communities'.


The Varney Review: December 2006

Sir David Varney's report: 'Service Transformation: a Better Service For Citizens and Businesses, a Better Deal for Taxpayers', identifies major opportunities to strengthen public service delivery to make it more accessible, convenient and efficient to meet changing citizen and business expectations. The report's recommendations include:

  • developing a change of circumstances service starting with bereavement, birth and change of address by 2010, so that citizens don't have to notify multiple public services
  • providing citizens and businesses with single information and transactional websites through Directgov and Businesslink.gov
  • improving public sector contact centre performance including reducing operating costs by 25 per cent to release £400 million
  • developing a cross-government identity management system to enable greater personalisation of services and to reduce duplication across government

Sir David Varney said: "The service sector has an increasingly important role in the economy and public service delivery needs to evolve to meet the emerging challenges. There are opportunities to deliver better public services through joining up service provision across the public sector, and by engaging more directly with users in the design and delivery of services. Over the next 10 years there are opportunities to provide better public services at a lower cost to the taxpayer, if the Government takes these opportunities, then I believe the UK can create a world class public service economy with interactions with citizens and businesses that deliver real value and resolve problems first time."

Access the full report: 'Service Transformation: a Better Service For Citizens and Businesses, a Better Deal for Taxpayers' on the HM Treasury website.



User satisfaction and local government service provision: a national survey (October 2006)

Increasing the involvement of local people in local government is a major part of the government’s modernisation agenda. An understanding of user needs, levels of satisfaction and how to enhance it are essential to meet this objective. This national survey of user satisfaction with local government services lends itself to this process. The survey also measures how informed local residents feel about a range of issues relating to their local council, their level of contact with their council and their broader interest in local governance issues.



Customer voice in transforming Public Services: June 2006

Bernard Herdan, the Executive Director of Service Delivery, for the Identity and Passport Service, published his independent report reviewing the Charter Mark scheme and to consider other customer service issues for public services. It found that the key drivers of customer satisfaction within public services are considered to be:

  • delivery of promised outcomes and handling problems effectively
  • timeliness of service provision
  • accurate and comprehensive information, and progress reports provided
  • professionalism and competence of staff and treating customers fairly
  • staff attitudes – friendly, polite and sympathetic to customers’ needs

Access the report and the Government's response on the Cabinet Office website.



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