Voice of the Customer

My thanks to Nic Streatfeild, founder of rol Ltd the developers of GovMetric, for an email about his latest posting on his newish blog. Perhaps if I’d kept up with his Tweets I might have realised without the prompt!

GovMetric had the sense to realise that the Internet is not the only channel and so record feedback across the available ones, e.g. web, face-to-face and telephone.

When I started my research Nic was kind enough to meet up in Leicester for a chat about it and even offered access to anonymised data, which in the end I didn’t take up, but they’ve now taken a different approach and created the UK Councils Monthly Buzz Index out of their CouncilMonitor tool! So as well as reporting back citizen feedback via GovMetric they’re also trawling social media for feedback on councils. This seems a little like Professor Ann Macintosh’s IMPACT development work for the EU reported earlier, but focused on specific councils.

This experiment may or may not succeed but if nothing else will reveal some interesting trends across the GovMetric users. Unfortunately, for Nic and GovMetric my council and most of the others in North Yorkshire have signed up with a competitor, CMetrix. It’s nothing personal, just Yorkshire folk being canny with their money. What also may be interesting is when we can compare data across five districts and a county council.

My list of all the similar systems to GovMetric and CMetrix is still available  at Company table V8.

USA Government Web Sites

The latest comScore review of US government web sites sees some interesting changes in usage.

From my particular point of view I’m also interested in their employment of user satisfaction as a metric. One quotation that caught my attention is that “On January 21, 2009, President Obama issued a directive stating that ‘Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.’” I highlight the fact that “information” is required, not the seemingly obligatory “transactions”.

Perhaps the US has wised up to the Canadian observation that what citizens want is information prior to considering any transaction, and that transaction may be carried out across multiple channels in the end?

Incidentally I’ve updated my table with the latest CMetrix product, so am now at Company table V6.

NI14 – update to the guidance

A useful post (bk-ni14-dec-2008) on the ESD-Toolkit forum, that some won’t have access to is a two page document from Bob Kamall of the Cabinet Office. It comes in response to issues raised at the Tower 8.5 event in London that I attended. It does provide a little clarity and may calm a few concerned individuals and authorities, giving them time to get their acts together and do it right.

An additional update is to my list of system suppliers for satisfaction and NI14 recording. Cmetrix advise me that their URL is actually www.cmetrix.co.uk. Version four is here: company-table-v4

Satisfaction counts!

I fell over another company providing a software solution to measuring “satisfaction” very recently. It was only at the back-end of “googling” National Indicator 14 (NI14) that it fell into my lap – it looks promising and affordable and I hope to try it soon.

The product is Mavis and the company CMetrix, although I imagine their existing product line around measuring “satisfaction” is probably ideal for measuring what I propose, I expect the additional functionality of Mavis will be needed to extract NI14 data for the Audit Commission, Cabinet Office or in the real world to identify areas for transformation.

Boldly enough, and unlike any other they list the “opposition”, which takes some ba**s. Since they focus on customer satisfaction, I can only wish them success!