Our first recommendation is primarily one about culture and behaviours but it is fundamental. Many of the world’s best public sector and commercial organisations have made a point of placing customer or citizen needs at the centre of decision-making and product design. Indeed it was one of the guiding principles when GDS was established. It is such a truism that it is rare to find organisations or leadership teams that will argue against this principle but, to quote Jeff Bezos of Amazon on the topic: “good intentions don’t work, mechanisms do”. The point here is that it is unlikely that it will be enough merely for the Government to assert the importance of placing citizen needs at the heart of the digital transformation. Leading public sector and commercial organisations go beyond this and also put in place best practice mechanisms set up to ensure that these good intentions translate into concrete actions. Examples of these mechanisms include:
Amazon’s CXBR review process ensures that, often at an early stage of product design, any product is subject to a structured, independent review by a trained expert in customer experience design to ensure that no opportunity is missed to create the clearest and simplest design from the customer perspective.
Clear and timely operational dashboards so that senior leaders have granular, daily visibility into the lived daily customer experience of the services they are providing.
Leading organisations go beyond even this and put in place specific mechanisms to ensure that senior leadership remains closely connected to the actual citizen or customer user experience so that those in decision-making positions are constantly informed by a clear understanding of both the data and the anecdotal examples of the day to day reality of the customer experience.
We recommend that the Government establishes and enforces a similar set of mechanisms to make citizen experience central to design decisions. Doing so will be essential if the Government is to build what was expressed to us as “a culture where public servants see their primary obligation as building and operating services around the needs of the citizens who pay for them.”