Campaign for Customer Entitlement

Concerns about effective delivery of environmental services are likely to increase as policy makers look at prospect of a General Election sometime in 2010 if not sooner. Service providers may also be asked to adopt new agendas to respond to forthcoming manifesto challenges. What is going to be different than the critical debate that customers have already had so far? Also, will customers be able to lead on the agenda this time around? How can customers be involved in leading the forthcoming debate , if indeed there will be one, on local authorities’ capacity to improve critical services generally classified under ‘environmental services’?References to specific case studies and views of providers and beneficiaries of specific service providers should help to enhance critical debate. We also wish to set up an Online Customer Panel, which will evaluate the emerging debate, if not lead it through a web-based presence.

Would you be interested in making a contribution? The Campaign for Customer Entitlement is interested in providing insightful analysis through critical reviews aimed at understanding and evaluating the criteria and rationale used by policy makers and top managers for providing and monitoring these services. The focus of attention will be on public services covering the most contentious areas of public interest, normally described as the Environmental Services group, covering the following services:

o Parking services,
o Waste management and recycling,
o Highways maintenance and
o Closed circuit television.

However, in contrast, two other services will also be examined to show how the customers’ expectations for radical change do not just stop there. Service users are also demanding urgent review of the way customer services ‘desks’ and support services for elderly clients are managed. These ‘contrasting’ services have been selected for two reasons - elderly users of customer service support centres are less vocal but can become equally concerned. In the case of elderly services, there will be greater coverage of elderly ‘linklines’ or electronic alarm services which respond to urgent demands for client services in their homes or other dwellings. In general, elderly clients tend to be docile and forgiving, many of their relatives and supporters tend to have serious concerns with the way services are provided. It is useful to examine some of the pertinent details relating to environmental services:

Parking services also comprising traffic management and control.

Are councils with large parking services departments getting to grip with the critical issues relating to customer satisfaction? Customer complaints have been escalating. Local and national media continue to report on increasing levels of customer concerns. Have the councils formulated the best mix of strategies, set up the most viable structures and invested in mechanisms for delivery? Recent experience and Press coverage suggests that in many cases councils have been overwhelmed by demand and have failed to develop efficient business models to respond to the parking problem. What does the customer expect and how are their needs going to be met?
Waste Management and recycling.

What have the Councils learnt from Best Value? Was this just a very costly exercise both for the councils and the Audit Commission? Reports from the Best Value inspections do provide useful insights. There are many critical findings, which should inform a focussed but potentially hostile debate. Is it true that only a few councils have benefited from inspections? Are most of council run parking services still unaffected by best value criteria? Is it true that the Audit Commission did not select parking as a key service worthy of inspection? Some of the key questions for future analysis are:

o Have the heads of parking services been encouraged to ask to the right questions - where their services are, where they want to be and how they must get there?
o Are parking managers challenging policy makers to get the best support? How are they supporting their arguments? What is their business case?
o Do local politicians actually know the gaps in parking resources that they need to fund?
o How has the Audit Commission responded to the outcomes for the first phase of inspections? Does it have plans to publish analyses of aggregate results which may impact on parking planning and provision in the future?

Highways Management and Maintenance.

The media, particularly the BBC has been highlighting critical problems but only on a piecemeal basis. Currently they have been featuring the cost of poorly maintained roads and how users are sustaining damage to their vehicles. There are has been no analysis of the key issues. Critical questions about resolution of the problems remain to be asked.

Service Portfolios relating to services for the elderly.

We are living in an ageing society and any service that impacts on the quality of life of elderly people is a critical service and worthy of critical evaluation. While a number of councils have been partially successful in making changes they have not maximised the benefits of reviews. Newham Council appears to have taken the lead in challenging their alarm service, developing viable business plans and creating a basis for optimal funding. A number of others are reviewing the future of their services. Two case studies are under consideration and likely to be presented for detailed analysis, subject to permissions being granted by the service provider, namely Bexley and Greenwich Councils. In one case, a council commissioned seven different reviews of one of their elderly people’s services. All review reports but one made the same recommendations which were not implemented. Two clients were reported to have died but apart from some superficial action, the dismissal of staff was seen as a sufficient solution. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for maintaining successful link line services? The technology is changing and the service providers also need to take into account the needs of clients, NHS trusts, voluntary agencies, private sector providers and indeed potential funders and collaborators who may support programmes for outsourcing the services.

Customer Services Management.

Most council services have invested heavily in providing access to services and setting up ‘one stop shops’, reportedly ‘transformational’ service response systems and invested in customer response mechanisms supported by major investment. Have these service upgrades worked? What are the most critical questions that have remained unanswered?

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV).

Recent reports from police authorities suggest that CCTV has failed both as a deterrent and in recording crime to a standard that would result in higher levels of public safety. What has failed, how and why? CCTV is a major ‘industry’ that is supported by highly effective technologies. Many British suppliers have produced adaptable technology and support services. However, in one council it was suggested that half of the camera investment of £2 million had been wasted. Fifty percent of the cameras were either not working or recording crime. Many cameras schemes in car parks have failed to realise benefits. It would seem that there are three central areas of conflict as far as policy is concerned:

a) There is a high level of fragmentation- councils prefer to exercise control over relatively small geographical areas when some of the solutions may favour economies of scale arising from installing cross-borough systems. Will councils opt to give up control in favour of value for money?
b) Technology is changing fast, with new parking innovations offering more value for money. Councils are understandably finding it very hard to keep up with the pace of technology. What is needed is a new way of creating access to technology. More on this later.
c) CCTV, when connected to parking services is an income generator for councils. Is there a conflict between preserving income versus providing the best service?

CCTV is a highly ‘capital hungry’ service and most service managers tend to seek highly proactive approaches to configure their services in a climate where finance directors and policy makers are cutting budgets. The latter also tend to make ‘promises’ to constituents to install cameras, thereby creating the expectation that the presence of a camera will automatically deter crime. How can councils make some inroads into the very complex problem of ascertaining what is the optimal capital investment for CCTV assets? In London alone, on the average a council could be spending £1 million a year on its CCTV services. Noting the difference in camera intensity and configuration between outer London and inner London boroughs and the resulting impact of staffing, it is estimated that CCTV revenue and capital budgets vary from £2 million to £15 million per year- suggesting an average CCTV budget of £5 million per council. Questions: Is London’s estimated fixed cost investment of around £150 million effectively utilised? Further, are annual estimated staffing budgets of £20 million for the London boroughs used to provide full public benefit?

These examples should suffice but highlight the fact that there is a need for extensive research into policy and how all the above services are organised to sustain various conclusions that will inform the public debate in the next two years. Most importantly, there is a need for regional and national topicality. The proposed coverage will not be just London focussed. Also the range of services to be covered must appeal to wider audiences.

APPROACHING THE COMMUNICATION CHALLENGE

Public services, such as the ones highlighted above, are based on complex planning and delivery models. They are difficult services to run but affect the quality of lives of residents. The services highlighted above also reflect operational challenges faced by many other services of a similar nature. So no single council service is particularly mismanaged or suffers from disadvantage and no service is excellent or managed out of the ordinary.

My top six conclusions are:

1. Policy makers, i.e. local politicians of all political backgrounds do not always get to know the full picture on which to base their decisions; either top managers can be economical with the truth owing to custom and practice or they sometimes do not know it themselves. In almost all cases the decision-making process does not seem to benefit from access to key data and the most pertinent information. However, are policy makers asking for the right information? One has to challenge conventional systems rather than the managers or politicians.

2. A culture of short-termism prevails. The focus of service planning is biased towards the current financial year leaving key long-term decisions pending in a vacuum. These decision cycles are not always cost effective.

3. The public may not be asking the right questions. Does the average voter know much about the backlog of road repairs in their borough? It is estimated that backlog of repairs in a typical London borough could be twice the annual budget for road services. If average street maintenance budgets run at £ 8million, the backlog of accumulated road repairs could be as high as £15 million. Projected for London as a whole, the backlog of highway maintenance could be as high as £300 million, depending on how the costing is justified.

4. Party politics make very little difference to core services. There are rumours that cartels may start to operate in core services such as waste management, parking services, CCTV, i.e. any high volume contracting services where there are a few suppliers. Are managers given enough time to investigate these constraints?

5. Councils have cut management budgets to the point that currently many managers are taking responsibility for an untenable combination or mix of services. Temporary or interim management budgets have soared but on completion of many tasks, interim managers may leave very little permanent benefit if their output is not integrated into services. Only a few councils use interims well. The whole issue of management needs urgent review.

6. Council programmes for improving public service performance have also not been successful. The work of the Audit Commission has not been challenged, as is the lack of buy-in of the Commission’s role by councils. Some councils apparently saw the Best value Inspections as an imposition. In many cases it was the inspectors who began to receive scrutiny.

But here is number 7. There is no need to wait for a General Election in 2010 before serious action is considered. All parties must act now.
THE SCOPE OF A FORTHCOMING STUDY

A future study will be aimed at managements and policy makers. It will aim to cut through complex issues and offer insight into actions and decisions that have led not only to under-performing public services but also unlikely to curtail short-term solutions. The study will aim to challenge conventional wisdom but in every case also offer direct service based examples. A report will also aim to present examples of success and through aggregation of findings aim to provide convincing evidence that most environmental services departments are not learning organisations. ‘Crisis management’ may be a better description of their mode of operation.

We hope that the report will be timely. Councils are working towards the implementation of a new regime of inspections, to be known as Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAA). Will councils fail to benefit from CAA unless certain actions are taken well in advance to benefit from it?  The implications of failure could be very serious for customers.

There is a final concern. Will the Audit Commission be more confident and resolute in carrying out comprehensive area assessments than was the case with some of the best value inspections?

Many local authorities have been grappling with the problem of customer service. Many programmes of change have been tried and tested; some with success and others with notable failure. In the case of Ealing Council, ‘Response for making a difference’ was a substantial programme with promise of many efficiencies. Did they achieve their objectives? A substantial capital programme was authorised by policy makers to set up a customer response initiative which promised to change the way the entire council was supposed to function. Its a good time to visit the Council and to report on how the scheme has fared and to learn from its successes. However, there have been contradictory news which suggests that the scheme was actually abandoned. If that is the case what was put in its place?

Service providers continue to refer to the challenge of unlimited demand which has to be met with finite resources. Is this still the case? Yes and no. Local authorities are not start-ups. They have been in the ‘business’ for many years and so they would mostly know the specific patterns of demand they have to deal with. There are also many customer service management (CSR) and response management programmes on the market, offering various outcomes in terms of effective response, data aggregation, back office efficiencies and joined up service delivery. Customer response varies from centralised response at civic centres to several ‘one stop shops’ at various locations within borough boundaries.

It would also be useful to look at some of the CSR programmes. Which councils are using them and why? How much do they cost to install? In addition to set up costs, what further actions do councils have to take? At the end of all these comparisons, the main question to address remains: is the customer getting the right service at the right time and in the right format? We have not mentioned ‘the right price’. Is that not a key factor? No, not if councils are not charging for a service. However, there is a ‘price’; it is the cost that the customer has to incur in order to access the service. Customers do pay a high price for service failures.

More of these questions will be addressed in a future analysis. And yes, Ealing will be our first stop.

Broadband services are rapidly expanding and new providers are coming into the market. There is no evidence available on how many service providers may be leaving the market.

Many magazines publish guides to the major services and use different criteria to highlight their distinctiveness, cost effectiveness and value for money. What does a customer expect from a good broadband service?  Quick and reliable access to the service is a good starting point. Cost is another factor but many people who work from home do not mind the cost as long as reliability is not compromised.

One can hardly expect service providers to discuss openly what types of complaints they receive. However they must know why customers are leaving them. Do they? 

A future article will deal with the top ten issues that have frustrated broadband service users. Service providers will then be invited to comment on how they have dealt with similar complaints. Even more important is how they review their customer service policies.

For a start, customer service campaigns are never solitary. There is always a group of seemingly undervalued and unrecognised people known as ‘the customers’ who step forward and expect to be acknowledged. I know of at least three managers who spend a great deal of their time in dealing with customer correspondence relating to service complaints but they are not able to link the feedback from customer correspondence about their needs and expectations with the opportunities they could create for upgrading service delivery. There are five challenges for these managers:

1. How to skillfully handle customer complaints
2. How to ensure that the same complaints are not repeated everyday
3. How to train other staff to deal with complaints - do you want to employ the world’s highest paid complaints handler because a director does not trust his own staff to deal with ‘irate’ customers?
4. In keeping with number 2 above, how should the organisation learn from existing complaints to the extent that it is able to integrate improvements into the delivery mechanism? The alternative is to keep on dealing with the same complaints repeatedly.
5. How to learn from other service organisations.

There will be more discussion on how to address these opportunities. What would also be useful is to discuss how service providers should avoid being reactive when things go bad. Good complaints avoidance programmes should be strategic, ongoing, continuous and be based on open communication. Simple? Not really. We hope to bring you a few examples of success.

The Campaign for Customer Entitlement is nothing new. There have been many commentators and analysts in the past who have campaigned on behalf of the customer. The popular media features to customer complaints against service providers on a daily basis. It makes even better copy when they name and shame service providers. However, in extreme and justifiable cases this may be the only alternative.

Consider the plight of the hundreds of travellers who were stranded at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 during the last few weeks. These customers of British Airways and British Airports Authority were angry, exhausted and complaining about their customer service entitlement.

Agnes Huffy[1] is an American consultant who advises airports and airlines. Her services might have come at a high premium last month at Heathrow, where the airport operator was blaming the airline in the early stages of the critical breakdown of services. The customers felt that their entitlement was going to be serviced by the airline because they were the service provider that had ‘taken’ their money. The roller coasters of customers’ emotions were probably matched evenly but in private by predictable waves of blame and confusion where airline and airport took turns in allocating fault.

Agnes Huffy, writing at a different time in relation to entitlement says “I was always under the impression that the delivery of good customer service was a key objective for all public contact jobs. I thought that a company’s success and survival depended upon its ability to provide excellent service to distinguish and differentiate itself from the competition. Today, it appears that such differentiating factors include a growing number of complaints about “service,” which many feel has disappeared not only from our vocabulary, but also from our overall travel experience”.

No Agnes, it is still there but customers seem to have become used to accepting declining levels of service in all spheres of the customer/service provider relationship. There seems to a cultural shift in accepting less for paying more. Someone was saying that service is better in Loitokitok.

Agnes Huffy goes on to ask, “ Have we irreversibly learned during our formative years to expect more than what is realistic? Perhaps our ambition and will to succeed creates a false sense of entitlement that we carry throughout our life experience. To understand the root of the issue, perhaps we need to consider the source. If you ask the disgruntled why they are disgruntled, we usually find it stems from a combination of a pre-conceived lack of trust, and an innate belief that they automatically deserve to get the most — regardless of the level of output or investment on their par”.

While I think I know where Agnes Huffy is coming from, I would not have said what she says next within ten miles of Heathrow Airport. Agnes Huffy says “ In a society where people are constantly clamouring to get the most out of everyday experiences in life, whether in business, travelling, playing, or at home, our perpetual expectation is to always get what we want. When this does not materialize according to our expectations, and in as timely a manner as we anticipate, we become frustrated, impatient and irritated, often generalizing the past negative experiences and perhaps even blowing them out of proportion. These negative mind patterns then continue to repeat themselves and become oppressive to our overall worldview”.

The customer for public services in Britain is described by labels, which reflect the different expectations of the service provider and the recipient. When my local council does not collect my rubbish bin, I may be classified as a disgruntled ‘resident’. But is the expectation of a reliable collection of my bin also not my entitlement?  Leave my bin outside for a day and the cat from 11 houses away will expose chicken tikka massalla that I did not share with him- he loves my food more than his own.

Armando Martinez, who works in the rather esoteric and higher-level world of ‘telcos’- telecommunications companies providing broadband and other personal media related services says, “ Entitlement is the process of authorizing a service (a music or broadcast TV channel, pay per view, etc.) or content (a movie, program, game or special event) to a customer. Entitlement also includes the assignment of rights, which are the rules that govern how services and content can be used”. Entitlement management systems are increasingly needed in Britain’s public sector. These systems should be capable of managing complex functionalities and challenges, such as those of collecting my bin, repairing my road, cleaning the street in live in and educating me to learn more about recyclining the waste that my household generates. Is my local council’s entitlement management system able to track what service its customers, not ‘residents’ need? Has the council invested in capable systems to track how services are provided and how the delivery of entitment is monitored by them?

Did the attributes provided below apply to the situation at Heathrow Aiport?  Could one have switched the labels? How many customers might have gone home feeling that it was service providers who were unhelpful, inattentive, impolite and unprofessional?

Agnes Huffy: “To have proper perspective, we need to adjust our way of approaching customer service interactions and communications. We should not expect rude treatment, and we should definitely not be so surprised when we experience kindness, consideration, and attentive customer care”.

Campaign for Customer Entitlement (presently with just one member) will be examining issues relating to customers’ right to service -entitlement, especially in relation to services. While the content will be drawn largely from public sector experience, there will also be occasional coverage of service delivery in business. The public sector has a lot to learn from business but the reverse is also true. 

Local authorities provide a group of services that known as ‘environmental services’. These services are perceived to be the most difficult to manage. The service group consists of waste management and recycling, street cleansing, street lighting, highways maintenance, parks and gardens, transport planning, parking services, CCTV, planning and control and some aspects of regeneration.

Inspection reports provided by the Audit Commission under the their Best Value inspections regime show that these services are not the most successfully managed. These services have often brought down the overall performance ratings of councils. Waste management and recycling remains a major area of concern. Why is waste management a problem?

There a number of distinct factors and more will be added over the next few weeks:

1. Waste management is a highly visible service and policy makers and politicians see it as a critical service
2. These services are high cost, capital intensive and require careful asset planning and management. Service managers have little or no control over strategic planning; the reasons vary.
3. Waste management and recycling is driven by tight time schedules and failure is not an option.
4. Waste management cannot be run by councils on their own. They must work with other local agencies and both the private and voluntary sector
5. Waste management poses some of the most significant challenges for customer consultation, handling complaints and dealing with the fallout.
6. Service providers often have to face the flak created by contractors
7. Many services are run by narrow minded functionalists, mostly engineers who see the technical logistics as more challenging than business modelling and planning
8. Performance management may be weak and service providers do not collect the performance indicators voluntarily
9. There is a serious skills gap - middle managers and customer facing staff need training and development but more courses is not the answer
10. Policy makers have not invested in strategic planning and taken a long-term view in most cases.

Lets stop here but return to each of the above issues in the future.  Do you want to talk ‘rubbish’ as well? Why not write to me privately if you do not want to leave a comment. Confidentiality is guaranteed. Please write to me at kalwant.ajimal@btinternet.com

We also have a Top Prize section where the most significant service failures experienced by readers will be featured. It is also important to balance this by featuring the best examples of action taken to improve the service. Note: where ‘naming and shaming’ is involved we reserve our right to check first with service providers.