Responsiveness
3.0.1 In this section, we consider “softer” approaches to improving the buying experience: standards, customer services, accessibility and so on. We may not be able to directly affect the quality of the relationship between private sellers and their customers but we hope to investigate what we can do about this in the public sector – and see whether any best practice can indeed be taken over to the private sector.
3.1 Faceless Britain
3.1.1 The term “Faceless Britain” has been used to refer to the challenges experienced by millions of ordinary people every day in accessing public services. With every year that goes by, more and more services that used to offer face to face contact are being replaced by systems that are centralised, remote and inhuman. We are seeing the development in the economy of, increasingly remote systems that are divorced from the people they are supposed to serve.
3.1.2 Large corporations and government departments increasingly refuse to conduct business face-to-face with their customers. Not only is this creating a frustrating, rigid, unresponsive, poor quality marketplace for goods and services: it probably makes bad business sense. There is a real need to articulate this new experience and to consider what can be done tackle it.
3.2 Accessibility
3.2.1 Related to the above, we are also eager to widen access to good quality goods and services (both private and public). Many potential consumers are thwarted from the start, owing to geographical disparities or other physical barriers to trade. We also need to examine how accessible European marketplaces are to British consumers: we have heard the rhetoric, but is the experience of liberalised European goods and services a reality?
3.3 The Seller Approach
3.3.1 The normal selling experience (in a high street, for example) is for a potential customer to approach a seller directly. But we should remember that sellers do not have to wait for customers to arrive at their door. Sellers have developed entire industries based around approaching their own consumer base: indirectly (through generic advertising campaigns) or directly (through increasingly sophisticated means of personalised and evidence-based marketing, and direct sales). This has created concerns about privacy and pressure selling which impact on the relationship between consumer and supplier. We deal with some of these concerns in Section 5 (Consumer Protection).
Questions
- What can be done to tackle the “Faceless Britain” problem and to improve the interface between institutions and people?
- How should the rights of the individual to privacy be protected against increasingly sophisticated targeting by sellers?
- What can we do to improve the responsiveness of large organisations to the needs of their customers?
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:42 am
In my experience, public servants you meet have no discretion anyway, so the “personal touch” is just someone reading a set list of questions off a screen over the phone rather than you reading it yourself!
If public servants could shift things around to help you, if they had directives from government that spelled out regions of possible action, and had flexibility under that system to help you, with the possibility of complaint if you thought they were doing it wrong (which would just take things back to the old restricted format again), then you could really have someone go “I’ll see what I can do” in confidence that they would actually be able to put something together.
Now doing that requires a system that is more secure, and I would rather ID cards and decentralised information sharing (I use the authority of my ID card or in-person signature to allow you to share info, and only then can you do it), than no ID verification and all kinds of generic stores of my personal information.
If I have the power to give public servants discretion in my case, then I don’t need to worry so much about information sharing or flexibility being misused, because I can control it’s extent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if such a system were faster, and provided smoother public services.
And just to be encouraging, a lot of the companies I deal with are getting better at talking to people, not worse. Perhaps you could catalyse this by including it in the business advice people get and providing a working template.