Citizen relations management

BANTAY GOBYERNO

Ike Señeres

At the risk of stating the obvious, I would still say that a citizen is also a voter, also a taxpayer and also a customer. The first three “roles” are already widely known already, but very few would tend to consider a citizen as a customer. Meanwhile, the knowledge to deliver or provide customer services has now evolved into a science called “Customer Relations Management” or CRM for short.

That is good as far as the private sector is concerned, but my wish is for the government to adopt CRM, simply by substituting “Customer” with “Citizen”. Strictly speaking however, that may not even be necessary if we could all accept that a citizen is actually a customer. Under ordinary circumstances, anyone is considered a customer if he or she is a “Buyer” of whatever products or services, wherein it is clearly implied that he or she is paying for the goods or services.

In a manner of speaking, it could actually be said that a citizen is a customer, because he or she is actually paying for all the public services by way of his or her taxes. As a matter of fact, there are many examples wherein a citizen actually pays for certain services, such as passports and licenses.

With that as a background, we could agree for the sake of argument that if only the government would adopt the science of CRM, we could all get a higher quality of service from all government agencies, as if these agencies are actually private companies. Not to go too far, all Government Owned and Controlled Corporations (GOCCs) could actually adopt CRM as if they are private corporations because in truth and in fact, they are actually corporate organizations except for the fact that they are government owned rather than privately owned.

Under existing laws, it is perfectly legal for government agencies and other instrumentalities to outsource their functions to the private sector, in which case the private company involved becomes a service provider, providing certain services for and on behalf of the government. There are many examples of that in several foreign countries, wherein certain services such as jail management and customs administration are already outsourced. Crude as they may be, security guards and janitorial services are already outsourced in practically all government agencies. In theory, it could actually be said that other government functions such as market research and database management could already be outsourced. Hopefully, government agencies would eventually be able to compare the costs if they are confronted with the options to in-source or outsource.

The theory behind outsourcing is that the services provided by the contractors should be cheaper and better, two concepts that could be interpreted as either being efficient or effective, as the case may be. What that means is that the government would actually end up as the winner, because the delivery of services would cost lesser, and the quality would be higher.

Generally speaking, it could be said that the quality of in-sourcing would be lower, because the agencies that would provide the services would not have a profit motive. Conversely, the outsourcing providers are driven by profit motives. A good example of this would be jail management, wherein the private sector could probably provide services that are not only cheaper, but are also more secure, aside from having more nutritious food. Ideally, the scope of jail management should also include rehabilitation, the real purpose of being jailed.

Although I said that CRM is a science, the real science behind it now is Information and Communications Technology (ICT), now usually in the form of websites or mobile apps. As it is happening now, many mobile apps have website versions, and vice versa. Regardless of what form it takes, ICT software should be well designed in terms of “User Interface” (UI) and “User Experience” (UX), with the goal in mind of having the best CRM by having the best customer engagement.

Yes, customer engagement is really the name of the game, and the object of the game is customer satisfaction. Although it may sound like I am going around in circles, I am actually going direct to my point, and my point is that government agencies, just like private corporations, should now adopt CRM software with superior UI and UX built into it, for the sake of the highest customer satisfaction.

It is not true that a career government employee could never be removed from office for whatever reason. The truth is that he or she could only be removed if there is a reasonable cause, and if there is due process. As it is now, most government agencies are already implementing their own performance rating standards.

                While that may be a good start, the next step should be to correlate individual scores with the collective customer satisfaction ratings. If the ratings are low, it would imply that the customers (read as citizens) are not happy with the services provided.

Somehow, some ways, the Filipino people would ultimately realize that they have the power not only as citizens and customers to rate the services of government agencies, they also have the power to dictate their fund sources as taxpayers and voters, at least in theory.

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