Recently Bruce McGregor sat down
with Loan Kiss the Conference Producer for Akolade’s Service Delivery Transformation Conference, coming to Sydney on 10-12 June 2015, to discuss the
challenges the public service industry faces in delivering services to meet the
community’s needs.
L = Loan Kiss B:
Bruce McGregor
L: First of all, thank you for taking some time out of your busy
schedule to speak to me.
What do you think are the top 3 biggest challenges in service delivery
within government agencies at the moment?
B: The three biggest challenges
in service delivery within Government I believe are:
Leadership
Unless there
is a mandate or a commitment from the very top of your organisation or agency,
then service delivery in Government will not fundamentally change. Service
delivery transformation is both a customer experience and a cultural change to an
organisation. And this change must occur whilst the business is still
operating. Out of the two, the cultural
change is the most important to tackle and that requires strong leadership!
Focus
Getting clear
and then staying clear on the immediate priorities is tough. So much is
typically happening in the business anyway, so it’s important to set the goals
upfront and stick to them. That doesn't mean a goal can’t change, but any
decision made must be done in context of the overall outcome you are seeking to
achieve.
Consistent & Relevant Communications
We work in an
industry where change may not have been as prevalent as what other industries
have experienced. If you have worked in
both public and private sectors, you will know that the private sector has a
market and competitive pressure that we don’t necessarily have in some sections
of the Government. However, this is changing as well. But staff, suppliers and
key partners of your organisation must be constantly updated on the change and
it’s important to get a real sense of the best types of communications tools to
use and to keep the messaging constant. When the communications go out, one of
the underlying messages to keep outlining is the “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM)
factor. Keep messaging why the change
will be of benefit for staff as they are your internal customer of the service
delivery change.
L: What opportunities, from your point of view, can improving service
delivery bring to the public sector?
B: There are many. But one I
would like to focus on is that every day, 24x7 our customers interact with the
services we offer. If we can improve the service delivery aspects, we improve
the general public perception of Government being historically a poor service provider.
If we improve, then the opportunity to surprise and delight our customers is
something the public want to see. This is a good thing for any Government. The
additional opportunity this also brings is we can then improve the work-life
experience of our internal customers as well.
L: How will your department aim to improve digital engagement and
customer experience?
B: Our customer service team at
the QBCC are on a journey where we are channel shifting customer services that
are predominantly transactional (pay, renew, search) to our Digital channels. Yet
digital engagement remains focused on the customer experience. Some examples
of this include that we look to design with Digital so we can get twelve clicks
on a website down to three. Our channels are now in a responsive design so we
cater for any device and we are investing into the development of digital
smart forms which connect directly into our CRM. Our QBCC social-media channels
are also starting to gain followers and so we’re now moving from a listening
focus (one way) to an engagement focus (two way).
Internally, Digital plays a
significant role also. We’re re-designing our QBCC Intranet so we can make it
simpler and easier for our staff to get access to the information they need to
complete their daily tasks. We've even
given it a new name internally. It used to be called ‘Portal’. It’s now called ‘Trevor’! In turn, we enable our internal customers to
be able to deliver a better experience to our external customers.
L: How does your department plan to leverage digital channels within
the next 6-12 months?
B: Digital is a part of the QBCC channel
story ~ it is not the QBCC channel story. It is easy to get lost in just
trying to focus on a digital channel experience without taking into account all
channels. I believe if you do this, you’re starting to drift towards a
technology outcome and not a customer centric outcome.
The main focus area for our digital
channels right now is our digital smartform roll-out. We have spent time
calculating our cost to serve across all of our channels and we’re rebuilding
our transaction-based services to be an amazing Digital experience versus just
an inbound phone call or hand-written, snail mail experience. That doesn't mean
we don’t re-design our service experience just for Digital. We design for all
channels, but we want (and our customers want) to transact more easily via
Digital 24x7. Our Smartform’s connect directly into our CRM, and we’re taking a
lot of the friction out when people need to pay us. This approach does deliver efficiency
dividends as we can see where the volumes of higher cost to serve transactions are
being transformed to a lower cost to serve transaction.
New digital channels are shortly
coming online such as our mobile application services for both Home-owners as
well as Builders. As mentioned before, our Social channels are growing and
we’re starting to move to a two-way engagement strategy with our customers. Across
all of our digital channels, we consistently aim to bring customers back to our
website or call us 24x7 if they’re looking for more information.
L: What are your key strategies or tips you could share in building successful
service models to produce effective outcomes?
B: We base our service delivery
on two key strategies:
- Prototype and fail fast
- Design with’ the customer.
These are not easy strategies to
adopt if your business does not currently work that way and hence, why the Leadership
from the very top is so important.
Prototyping is having the ability
to test ideas quickly with the customer and having the courage to start-again
or change. ‘Design with’ takes time and resource, but we have discovered this
is super critical to our service delivery experience and we been able to show
the benefits early on in the journey.
Our other strategy focuses on getting
the right people and partners around you to help map out a path that works for
your team, your organisation and can keep your stakeholders happy and
supportive along the way.
Our other strategy regarding
service delivery is this isn't just about external customers; it is very much about
our staff ~ our internal customers. In
many instances you discover that they play a more important role then external
customers. This is easy to say, but we have discovered sometimes it is quite
hard to achieve as a successful service outcome as we would like.
L: Why did you decide to speak at Akolade’s upcoming Service Delivery
Transformation event and what do you hope delegates will get out from your time
at the event?
B: I asked to speak at the event
so I could learn from others. The QBCC has been on a large service
transformation experience since the 1st December 2013 and we are not
there yet. So, we still have a lot to learn from other agencies and contacts on
what has and hasn't worked for them in their transformation journey.
In return, I am hoping I can now
start to offer some insights to others of our experiences of our QBCC journey ~
what has worked well and in particular, what hasn't! Because we are in the public
sector, we have a level of freedom to discuss and share insights and
experiences of how we have gone about service change, which you sometimes don’t
get access to in the private sector.
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