Citizen Relationship Management: The Rocky Road from Transactions to Empowerment

The ODPM produced a three-stage “CRM Strategy Framework” to support the CRM Pathfinder projects in 2001. The stages were: “improving accessibility of services”, “transforming a department-based organisation into a customer-centric one” and “delivering innovation in services”. An analysis of the Pathfinders reveals a number of initiatives aimed at improving access and some service innovations, but little mention of the critical middle stage:

“organisational transformation”. The focus is almost exclusively on providing a wider range of more efficient access channels.
The follow-up CRM National Programme tells a similar story. The focus is on rapid resolution of enquiries and on satisfied customers.

This is a positive achievement no doubt, but is essentially reactive. Problems with the cost of CRM, with information sharing and joined-up services, and with change management are reported and may well stand in the way of councils achieving wider and deeper use of CRM.

Co-Production and Empowerment

So, can more be done? Take the case of Social Services, a major area of local government. Social services deal with complex situations and vulnerable people. For example, the design and implementation of a care plan for a disabled child will involve several stakeholders: the child, the parents/guardians, a social worker and possibly health and education professionals. It is increasingly being recognised, particularly in health, that the patient should be a “co-producer”

of his/her own care and for this to be effective the patient needs to be involved in its design and have a stake in the outcomes.But the private-sector model of CRM assumes the organisation which runs the system owns the customer data and does something “to” the customer rather than “with” them. The customer is on the receiving end, not the producing end.

Putting the expensive, sophisticated private-sector CRM systems to one side for a moment, the question now becomes – what kind of ICT can best support the co-production process? Not surprisingly, simple technology such as mobile access to databases, the internet and e-mail come out high on the list. These technologies enables stakeholders to meet at the most appropriate location (e.g. the citizen’s home) and work together in a way that is understandable to all. Also ‘customer insight’ takes on new meaning, where the customer, via ICT and the professionals, is given insight into his/her own situation, needs and possible solutions.This argument suggests an alternative to the ODPM’s CRM strategic framework (figure 1). Unlike the ODPM’s approach, the new model acknowledges the development of a citizen-centric system is far from easy. To emphasise this point a Wall is placed between stages three and four, representing a significant barrier between traditional, bureaucratic, political government organisations and the dis-empowered, and often dis-engaged, citizen.

Figure 1 indicates three possible relationships between local authorities and their citizens:

This is where the CRM pioneers are at today. A CRM helps provide efficient responses to citizen enquiries supported by transactional systems to enable apointments to be booked,payments received, benefits paid etc.For this relationship to work fully, services and systems must be integrated.

This is the aspiration of many local authorities. This corresponds to privatesector CRM ‘best practice’

Applying this logic to council customers, one approach to citizen segmentation would be to replace ‘amount spent’ with ‘cost incurred’ to the council by the citizen’s use of services creating ‘RFC’ based segmentation (Recency, Frequency, Cost). Councils could then ‘target’ the highest scoring citizens (e.g. vandals, noisy neighbours) in order to improve/reduce their use of services. Recent research reveals that no councils are engaged in this kind of relationship with their citizens yet.

An insightful relationship: citizen-driven

This is radically different to the traditional CRM concept. The relationship is predicated on extensive citizen access to information and systems. This could, for example, be via web-based community portals linked toGeographical Information Systems, which enable citizens to find out more about local services (and their performance) and to the later stages of the ODPM model. In the private sector many techniques are usedto segment customers and target them with products and services. The most popular technique is RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value), where firms target the most recent purchasers first, then within that group the most frequent purchasers, and within that group the highest spenders. and to challenge service providers to improve performance, through greater citizen involvement in service design and delivery. Early examples of community portals are appearing in some local authorities, such as Wandsworth, whilst North Lincolnshire council is exploring what it means to be held ‘accountable’ to its citizens.

Conclusion

To conclude, instead of simply following the private sector CRM model, and retaining power and control of the relationship in the hands of the local authority, citizen relationship management could be re-balanced, with power being shared between the provider and the consumer. This requires a lot more ‘letting go’ on behalf of the former and more engagement on behalf of the latter.