In September's LGC survey into councils' channel shift strategies, only 37% of local authority respondents said they were already making full use of service users' contact data to gain customer insight. Anybody who picked up on this fact might well have then been surprised by some of the conversations at the LGC roundtable on 23 November on 'harnessing customer insight for service transformation', hosted by Serco at the offices of our Experience Lab research company.
Here it became clear that gaining a deeper understanding of what citizens truly want is emerging as an essential element of service design as authorities increasingly focus on enhancing their ability to deliver the right services in the right way to the right citizens — the key to a successful citizen engagement strategy. So the core questions being addressed by many progressive local authorities and their partners are less about whether they should be seeking such insight, but rather how they should do so and what they should then do with it.
The first requirement is clearly to move beyond the mere collection of raw data to gaining understanding of what it really means. Examples of how this might be approached included the story of how one council is profiling focus group respondents – as 'settlers', 'prospectors', and 'pioneers' – to enable a better understanding of characteristics, behaviour and responses and to tailor services for improved outcomes accordingly.
Another highlighted the potential role of 'social listening', monitoring Twitter and other social media to hear people's opinions of a council and its services to modify in 'real time'. And a third proposed fostering closer relationships with the voluntary sector, to which a relatively modest contribution in exchange for guidance on gathering the required insights would be a significant help.
In my view, there is potential for councils to be more receptive to the support of citizens and other potential partners in helping to design and communicate services. There is, after all, a vast amount of expertise just sitting out there. Local authorities can collaborate with citizens, academia and the voluntary sector, and they can bring in expertise from places such as the Serco Experience Lab.
There is much for citizens to gain from more local authorities adopting innovative approaches to truly understanding what they need and want, and I hope that in the months and years ahead they can embrace this very real opportunity.
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