This post is built on the previous post on Customer Centric Action on Need.

Practical transformation is built on analysis of local needs and constrained by the sum of resources available to local public, voluntary and community organisations and the citizens themselves. Commitment and desire for change has to emerge within each community and its service providing organisations. It requires strategic design and agile implementation. This post is a work of imagination provided to illustrate what could transpire.

This post imagines how Customer Centric Provision might support transformation in Service Providers, including local authorities. It does not address the delivery of the straight forward individual services within the scope of each organisation’s purposes or specific statutory requirements placed on the organisation.

The community governance structure and its representatives are now responsible for overseeing the meeting of the needs of its own community, both in terms of future provision and today’s delivery. They assess the overall delivery need and negotiate with elected representatives to ensure the resources will be available. The elected representatives likewise negotiate with their new regional governance body.

The community board understand and track needs in the community, the level to which they are being met and how delivery provision needs to change at an overview level. They are responsible for overseeing delivery, monitoring the effectiveness of provision and agreeing specific resource needs with each of the service provider organisations. They are also responsible for supporting the maintenance of effective organisational relationships between the service provider organisations.

Each service provider organisation including the local authority has autonomy within this governance structure and within agreements reached with peers to establish its own core purposes and identity.  Local branches of larger organisations need to adapt their broader identity and purpose to local needs.

The organisations contribute their: transformation, delivery, management, monitoring, learning, strategy development and co-ordination skills and their team support mechanisms to the maximum in pursuit of meeting the community needs.

In this local community the Local Authority has decided to organise its staff into skill sets to maximise sharing of the learning coming from the multi-organisational and customer action teams. These skills groups also plan their own development based on their own learning from delivery and in conversation with the overall community board’s perceptions of what the future holds. They co-ordinate their staff’s assignments into action teams.

At the overseeing level, the local authority is taking strategic decisions and leading development and delivery of its capability to enable it to contribute fully in pursuance of its core purposes based on evidence being gathered by the multi-organisational action teams and intelligence from its own community environment and partners.

The shared responsibility removes the wariness of responding to the broader needs of those who approach them, reducing the risk of customer ping-pong with desperate customers being turned away because of budget cuts. The delivery partnership board takes responsibility for deciding how very difficult situations are addressed, with collective responsibility of an individual’s actions taking over.

This post is based on the post on Customer Centric Action on Need.

Practical transformation is built on analysis of local needs and constrained by the sum of resources available to local public, voluntary and community organisations and the citizens themselves. Commitment and desire for change has to emerge within each community and its service providing organisations. It requires strategic design and agile implementation. This post is a work of imagination provided to illustrate what could transpire.

This post imagines how Customer Centric Action on Need would support transformation in society.

Customer Centric Action on Need is growing the competence of the widest possible range of organisations and individuals in the local area and encouraging them to step up and share the responsibility through team working at all levels. This has a significant impact on growing the community for all involved.  Struggling carers, for example, benefit from understanding how they contribute to the team and value highly the support they get from other team members and on the job skills development.

The main challenge is to ensure timely and effective input to overall community strategy from all stakeholder groups, leading to ownership of plans and delivery. Public sector and many voluntary organisations have governance structures and relevant staff to engage in strategy within the community. Even the smaller voluntary organisations are likely to have a CEO for whom this is part of the job. This is less likely to be true of community self –help groups, caring neighbours, the customers themselves and their families, who provide a large amount of delivery for citizens with complex needs. For these people, their focus is tightly on delivery, because they do not have the spare capacity to engage. Because these are grass roots organisations and individuals, strategy emerges gradually from practice and learning. They have not been involved at an earlier stage, so are often uncertain what they think about new initiatives until they actually get to experience them.

Now that the local community addresses transformation in an agile way, these vital inputs and community ownership connections are tapped by community agile Customer Centric Action Teams which feed back into strategy. The community groups do not feel they are helpless implementers of other organisations strategy but significant owners with a voice.

This could be a real force for community transformation.

This Post builds on the previous post on Customer Centric Action on Need.

Practical transformation is built on analysis of local needs and constrained by the sum of resources available to local public, voluntary and community organisations and the citizens themselves. Commitment and desire for change has to emerge within each community and its service providing organisations. It requires strategic design and agile implementation. This post is therefore a work of imagination provided to illustrate what could transpire. This post imagines how Customer Centric Action on Need would affect individual citizens with multiple inter-related needs.

For complex situations, it makes sense from the customer’s viewpoint to discuss all their related needs with one person and decide with the help of their service providers how they wish to proceed and what actions they want to happen. An initial exploration of need can open up new opportunities for co-design of solutions, where personal initiatives from the citizen, support from family, friends and neighbours and public and voluntary sector services and community groups, can all be explored to address the unmet needs. This approach has a number of benefits from the customer’s viewpoint:

Support for the customer who does not know what actions are possible, which organisation they should approach and whether they are eligible for help. These questions are addressed in customer centric action on need, by understanding the inter-related needs and issues at the front line of the organisation the customer chooses to speak to:

In the public and voluntary sectors there are frequent changes to services and eligibility criteria. To the inexperienced, the hurdles in finding the right service and establishing eligibility can be significant and the system itself can be a major barrier to reaching help for those in need, particularly those who are not accustomed to asking for help.

Support for the customer with complex interrelated needs who doesn’t know which need to address first, and does not know whether addressing one issue may resolve others. In Customer Centric working, systemic methods and tools are adapted for efficient front line use and information capture:

Addressing deeper causes may obviate the need to address current symptoms.

Removal of the need for signposting and the need to ‘tell their story’ again. Addressing issues raised by uncoordinated service delivery. In customer centric working the delivery is based on an understanding of the connection between their needs:

With signposting, customers may get more services than they need and want. Customer centred planning enables their self-help capabilities to be valued and the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution to be assessed and the plan revised.

In the past a customer who had addressed one need would then need to return for their other needs to be diagnosed. A plan based on understanding of complex related needs at one time, addresses the full range of needs from a chosen start point.

Customers not only have current needs, they may also have fears for the future.  Co-design gives them the opportunity to plan ahead for likely future needs and consider alternative strategies:

Linking development of future actions to customer ideas captured at the front line can be a powerful source of innovation. Understanding and capture of potential future needs and actions at the front line makes this possible.

Overall, the customer centric approach could lead to stronger engagement of citizens, family, neighbours and voluntary and community sector organisations in addressing an individual’s needs and increased skills in the community to handle these situations in future.

This post builds on the thoughts in the previous post on Customer Centric Action on Need

Practical transformation is built on analysis of local needs and constrained by the sum of resources available to local, public, voluntary and community organisations and the citizens themselves. Commitment and desire for change has to emerge within each community and its service providing organisations. It requires strategic design and agile implementation. This post is not a specific design but rather a work of imagination provided to illustrate what could transpire.

A by-product of producing and implementing shared action plans, is a set of complementary standard action components, collected and updated over time, to address the needs of a group of customers with a similar range of complex needs.  This information is managed in the form of a guide indexed by needs, with identification of skills, profiles by role, contact details and eligibility and planning information. The guide supports co-design and planning of appropriate actions.  The guide is updated by the action teams themselves as they learn.

Operationally these actions are delivered by individuals providing the activities identified in the plan (including the role of customer centred action co-ordination and monitoring), regardless of the organisational, customer or community status of each role player. This enables organisations to work within their budgets and customers within their competence, with team composition varying from customer to customer.

The total amount of resource from public, voluntary, community and customers clearly has to be adequate to meet the expected needs and this is established through stakeholder engagement in a joint planning process for each group of customers in the community. Shortfalls on skills are covered by planned background and on the job training, including for customers (or their advocates).

Customer Centric Action on Need enables electorates to choose to use more of or less of public funds to address citizen’s needs and to compensate for increases or reductions by providing less or more customer and voluntary and community sector action. Elected community representatives need to balance local needs against local taxes, other available funding and reserves and local commitments to payment in kind from the electors themselves, voluntary organisations, community groups and other separately funded public sector organisations.

Within each organisation, including the local authority, the plans for their overall skills and resource commitments are summed and managed within budget as skill related teams responsible for their own and multi-organisational action team shared learning and development.

Operations and management is overseen by the broadly representative community management team, supported by a resource bargain with the elected representatives.

The Impact of Service Cuts

At this time, local authorities need to reduce their spending whilst having little control over the amount of citizen’s needs they have a responsibility to meet. Whilst effectiveness and efficiency improvements and prioritisation of spend can help reduce costs, there is a risk that ongoing cuts may not only have a severe impact on community and individual quality of life, but could cause these citizens’ needs to escalate and emergency action costs to be incurred to the public purse, the individual and the community at some time and some place.

If local authorities perceive that cuts are reaching a point where budgets no longer meet essential needs, the choices would seem to be either, to find other ways to increase budgets, or to hand-over responsibility for meeting some of these needs to other people and organisations, perhaps through a combination of multi-organisational teams, self-help, friends, neighbours and the local community.

These posts introduce two contrasting paradigms: ‘Service Oriented Provision’ and ‘Customer Centric Action on Need’.

Service Oriented Provision

The public sector manages its customer relationships in terms of the services it provides and feedback from customers on the quality of its services delivered – referred to here as: Service Oriented Provision.  In the Service Oriented model, the citizen accesses the service either explicitly, or via stating a need which guides the organisation to offer the service. Citizens with a number of needs are also signposted on to other service providers.

Whilst Service Oriented Provision works well to streamline delivery of straightforward requests, not all customer and public sector relationships benefit from being understood and managed as a collection of individually requested transactions. Service Oriented Provision works particularly well for customers with only one need at a time. It is not so effective for customers with complex inter-related needs, as no one service deliverer is addressing the whole customer within their particular environment or pulling together a plan to resolve their inter-related needs.

Customer Centric Action on Need

Customer Centric Action on Need is positioned as an alternative to the Service Oriented model for customers with complex related needs. It also provides a flexible approach to support migration to inclusive customer and multi-organisation team-working, which can adapt to changes in electoral decisions. The Circle of Customer Need approach was an initial exploration of this second paradigm (Customer Centric Action on Need) and this set of posts represents a development of the thinking.

Customer Centric Action on Need starts with the customer rather than the service. The service provider who is approached gains a picture of the complex inter-related needs from their customer; understanding what a beneficial change might look like and co-designing a solution which involves both the customer and potentially a range of service providers. The same approach is available wherever in the local community the customer makes contact: in person, electronically or by phone. The customer centred action is co-ordinated by one of the service providers (including the customer’s own plans) and its success is measured in terms of the quality of life of the customer. The quality of life feedback and service quality feedback, is firstly for the learning of the action teams themselves, including the customer, secondly for their respective organisation’s management  and thirdly as evidential input for future strategy decisions and resourcing.

Aims of Customer Centric Action on Need

From a whole local area viewpoint, diagnosing needs and planning action at the front line creates significant efficiencies across the range of public and third sector providers. For individual customers, diagnosis of their set of related needs at the front line captures the essential data required to enable the action team member linkages to be made.

From a systems perspective, the ‘presenting’ need may not be the most effective need to address. For example: A refugee from domestic abuse might present with for example: a need for medical attention and or dentistry, a need for trauma counselling for themselves and their children, housing needs, ongoing security issues, a need to move children immediately to a new school given impending exams, a need for victim support through police investigation, emergency carer role cover for parents or neighbours, job loss or financial issues or many other specific needs. They may choose a public or voluntary sector organisation to ask for help, based on what they feel is the most pressing need and where they feel most supported. By having help to identify their competing and inter-acting needs, their emergency actions can be instigated and longer term decisions taken through co-design based on the broader view including self-help, community and family support and local service providers.

With Customer Centric Action on Need, gathering evidence of impacts over a range of similar cases provides evidence for future strategic funding decisions.

The realisation of Customer Centric Action on Need requires public and voluntary sector service provider transformation and local community transformation. It requires unstinted commitment to partnership working and practical initiatives to enable one organisation to act on behalf of another organisation, data that can be shared, appropriate skill development and adoption of common standards. It requires a coherent picture to be maintained of total locality action capability and action roles.

The customer-centric approach may act to uncover hidden needs at an earlier stage, but will also provide practical evidence for electoral decision taking on how the sum of these needs should be met.

There are also expected to be overall systems effects, whereby the savings from avoiding repeated customer interviews, sharing learning, coordinating action on need, making better targeted service selections, increasing innovation and taking higher quality strategic decisions would allow more front line service to be delivered with the same resource.

The citizen with the needs (or their advocate) is an active team player in addressing the issues (more than a service recipient), with opportunities to learn new skills and able to get the help they need.