When we deal with customers, we might hear more complaints than praise. Don’t be discouraged. Customer complaints can be a source of valued feedback for enlightening the user experience of our services and products.
Are complaints changing civil services? Do they lead to innovation?
It is often recognised that civil services need to change.
People want better outcomes and expect them to be delivered well.
Our demands and expectations of what civil services can and should deliver are rising.
The crucial issues for enhancement in public service delivery constantly feature customer satisfaction and expectation as the yardstick. In addressing public expectation, the quality of public service delivery becomes the focal point.
New technology is rapidly changing how we access media and the news and how we communicate.
We expect responsive civil services to adapt and change.
In the era of digital government, organizations in public sector are increasingly using data to improve their performance, provide greater citizen engagement, and cultivate levels of collaboration and transparency (Reddick et al. 2015).
Civil services need to be centred around citizens and responsive to their needs, and work in different ways to engage and involve the public, communities and frontline staff.
Responding differently to complaints is one way of doing that.
Complaints can help to identify and prioritise need; highlight opportunities to change; challenge established wisdom; co-create and co-produce solutions; and uncover system failures.
Complaints provide an opportunity to open a dialogue with the public, being open to criticism and making it easy for people to complain by seeking and encouraging feedback.
Complaints help identify blind spots in operational contexts, and thereby hold the key to unlocking innovation and improvement.
