Who doesn’t desire a good experience? A good experience makes one feel good about a thing, place or people. Customer experience topic have been greeted with lots of enthusiasm however, understanding and practicing it, is a different thing entirely.
How do you feel using government services from immigration to tax filing to receiving care in hospitals, do you leave with memorable and delightful experience? Or do we simply assume that a great customer experience in government institutions is only to be heard and not to be seen?
We conducted recent research recently in respect to understanding customer experience in government institutions. The research sought to help our audience to gain insight to the public perspective on customer experience in their interactions with government institutions and to define and promote customer experience programs in public institutions.
Our research findings shows that customer experience is poor in Nigerian government institutions, most importantly 88% of respondent preferred certain government services that directly impact on the citizens should be privatized and transferred to private sector to manage.
A 2019 publication by McKinsey Insights established that one of the reason government do not invest in customer experience is that leaders most of the time invest where they are used to seeing value and as such generous budget is not allotted to creating customer experience programs. However, it is key we understand that to strengthen public trust in government, customer experience must be encouraged.
Among the 256 participants in our survey, 91% says there are no good customer experience in the public sector. Reputation wise, this is an alarming verdict on the government institutions created to serve the citizens. If public institutions in Nigeria lack basic understanding of customer experience, how can they serve the citizen better let alone adopting new approaches and technologies to accelerate changes in the service to the citizens.
The lack of ability to offer a citizen centric service may perhaps be responsible for the position of 88% of our respondents who believe that some of the current services performed by government department should be transferred to private firms. A seemingly consensus among respondents that privatizing government services is best for the citizens connotes that government institutions do not understand precisely what matters to the citizens
To be more citizen centric, policy formulators and skill transformation experts needs to develop a user-centric framework whereby government institution workforce embrace upskilling and retooling in other to develop a mindset that connect better with the citizen, it only then that they can provide a citizen centric services that leaves users with a delightful experience. Engaging customer experience strategy in government institutions will help government to understand what people wants and what is important to the people. For the required changes in public service , government need to
- Prioritize customer experience
- Engage expert to do a skill transformation journey map for each government institution so as to keep an up to date experience for the customer
- Understand what drives customer experience
- Get a complete data that links customer satisfaction to wait time on all touchpoints as well as how customer think and feels.
- Make reliability and simplicity the drivers of customer experience.
Conclusion
I would like to liken government institutions to the palm tree, Palm trees are very easy to grow, but they are equally easy to kill if not cared for properly with pruning , fertilizing and so on. Similarly, government institutions must maintain their growth with pruning (cutting out bad services, and unprofessionalism) and fertilizing by trainings, engaging experts and exploring the data available so that like the palm tree that people come under for shade can be attractive to them and they can in turn trust them for great delightful experience.
