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.