Int. Journal of Business Science and Applied Management, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2007

Customer Focus in UK e-Government: Or, Putting the

Politics back into e-Government

James Cornford

Centre for Social and Business Informatics, Newcastle University

Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK,

Tel: 0191 2430801

Fax: 0191 2430814

Email: james.cornford@ncl.ac.uk

Paul Richter

Centre for Social and Business Informatics, Newcastle University

Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK,

Tel: 0191 2430796

Fax: 0191 2430814

Email: p.a.d.richter@ncl.ac.uk

Abstract

The techniques and technologies of customer service, as introduced under the guise of e-government,

have brought certain aspects of public service users into sharp focus, but at the expense of other

aspects. It is hypothesised that this effect may lie behind the failure of half a decade of IT-enabled

change in public services to improve ‘customer satisfaction’. Remedying this situation, it is suggested,

will require a re-examination of the model of the customer which underpins customer service as it has

been adopted by public service organisations.

Keywords: e-government; public services; customer service; representation; CRM

Acknowledgements: A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Academy of

Management e-Business & e-Government Special Interest Group meeting “New Frontiers in e-

Business, e-Government and e-Learning” at Newcastle University November 9-10, 2006. We would

also like to acknowledge the useful comments of two anonymous referees.

James Cornford and Paul Richter

1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEMATIC

Achieving widespread citizen acceptance and take-up of services via new channels presents an

urgent and important challenge if we are to realise the benefits from these new and innovative

ways of working. In order to do this, we need to improve our understanding of customer

preferences, as well as their needs (Cabinet Office, 2006: 52).

In this paper we address an apparent anomaly in UK e-government. Bluntly put, the problem that

we want to start with is this: the IT-enabled reform process that goes by the name of e-government has

had the idea of customer focus at its very centre, yet there is remarkably little evidence that the actual

customers are responding to being focused on in this way. International comparisons have begun to

draw a picture of UK e-government matching international standards in terms of the “supply side” but

with disappointing take up by the intended users: in short customer focus without (many) customers.

How can we explain this phenomenon of e-government without e-citizens? A range of

explanations have been put forward to account for this denouement. Is this just a matter of low

awareness, remediable by another advertising campaign and the passage of time? Or are our

supposedly world class e-government systems in fact poorly designed and plagued by what Richard

Heeks (2006) calls ‘design-reality gaps’. Or is it a matter of relative performance in which, however

much public services have improved, they have failed to keep pace with improvements in the private

sector?

Our contention in this paper is that there is something more fundamentally wrong here.

Specifically, we argue, the problem concerns the representation of the customer underpinning the

technologies and techniques of customer focus as they have been adopted by government. We start by

pointing out that organisations don’t actually focus on customers; rather they focus on a representation

of the customer. These representations shape – perhaps better focus – the attention and the capacity of

the organisation to respond to their customers. Issues and areas which fall outside of this focus become

invisible, inaudible or incomprehensible to the organisation. It is, we argue, at least partially this

problem that generates the ‘they’re not listening’ effect associated with a broad sense of public

disaffection with public services.

We complete the paper by arguing that what is required is a democratisation of e-government

which is focused on a process of rethinking the representations that underpin the technologies, systems

and processes constituting e-government. To recycle a well known slogan from a rather different

context, we conclude that there should be “no taxation without representation!”

2 CUSTOMER FOCUS…. WITHOUT CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?

Governments have been putting the customer at the centre of e-government in the UK since the

late 90s. The Modernising Government 1999 White Paper makes clear the close links between the

customer, or user, focus and the joining up of services. The emphasis on public service users builds on

a long established critique of the public services as being particularly liable to ‘producer capture’ – that

is, services which come to be designed and managed for the benefit of the professionals producing

those services rather than their ‘users.’ The adoption of the business concept of ‘customer focus’ was,

at first, tentative. The White Paper is clearly informed by the notion of customer focus, albeit couched

in the more acceptable terms of a focus on ‘public service users’. According to the White Paper the

overarching goals of the modernising process are:

Ensuring that policy making is more joined up and strategic.

Making sure that public service users, not providers, are the focus, by

matching services more closely to people’s lives.

Delivering public services that are high quality and efficient.

(Cabinet Office, 1999: 6, emphasis in original).

While UK national Government was, at first, somewhat reluctant to use the “customer” label, the

suppliers of hardware, software and consultancy who have sought to supply the increased demand

which e-government represents have been less coy. A good example comes from the consultants

Deloitte Touche, who have produced an influential set of ‘Global public sector studies’ (2000; 2001;

2003a; 2003b) on e-government. As early as 2000, the company’s e-government report, At the Dawn of

E-government was subtitled ‘The citizen as customer,’ while the 2001 report, e-Government's Next

Generation was subtitled, ‘transforming the government enterprise through customer service.’ By

Int. Journal of Business Science and Applied Management / Business-and-Management.com

2003, however, (Deloitte Touche 2003a; 2003b) the theme (and language) of the reports had shifted to

highlight the cost saving potential of e-government. Those earlier reports had, however, done their job

and had placed the notions of customer service, customer focus and customer satisfaction at the centre

of the e-government agenda.

Subsequent central government policy documents have been far more upfront about using the

notion of customer focus. Almost any UK policy document relating to e-government in the period since

2000 would suffice to make the point. Here we use the example of a 2002 ODPM Guidance to local

authorities on the principles that should guide their e-government efforts.

Joined up in ways that make sense to the customer·

Accessible at times and places most convenient to the customer.

Customers will have more choice over the way in which they contact and receive public services.

Delivered or supported electronically, facilitating faster, more reliable and better value services.

Delivered jointly, where appropriate, by local and regional partnerships, and connected to a

national infrastructure.

Delivered seamlessly, so that customers are not asked to provide the same information more than

once and service providers are better able to identify, reach and meet the needs of service users.

Open and accountable so that information about the objectives, standards and performance of

local service providers and their elected representatives will be freely and easily available.

Used by e-citizens through effective promotion of available and accessible new technologies and

helping local people to gain the necessary skills to take advantage of the Internet. (ODPM, 2002b:

4 – italics added)

Customer service is, it seems, widely accepted as the core goal of e-government. In spite of this

consistent emphasis on the need for customer service, it is precisely this aspect of the e-government

programme above all others that is widely seen as underperforming.

First, there are concerns about the poor level of service users’ actual take up of the new, customer-

focused channels and media which have been built in the name of e-government. For example, in her

recent review of UK E-government, Helen Margetts has characterised the situation as follows:

From the demand side, in the United Kingdom at least, the rhetoric is still

running ahead of the results. The evidence … suggests that some of the

potential for e-government remains unused. For most citizens, the Internet

has brought far more change to their relationship with their bank or

various commercial outlets and to their social life than to their relationship

with government. Although the United Kingdom scores highly in some of

the international rankings of e-government when it comes to actual usage

it lags behind other European countries, North America and Australia

(Margetts, 2006: 262; See also Jones and Williams, 2005).

European comparisons carried out by Eurostat (2005) indicated that the UK was below the

European average for citizen take up of internet-based e-government channels and that it was at the

bottom of the 25 Member of States of the EU for business take up of new channels.

It is not only the poor citizen take-up of the new channels offered by e-government that has caused

concern. We should not fall into the trap of thinking of e-government as simply ‘government on the

web’. The technologies and techniques of customer focus are not reliant on any particular channel –

modern CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems support telephony and face-to-face

contacts as well as web-based interaction. There appears to be strong evidence of an entrenched

preference among UK citizens for face-to-face and, above all, the telephone channel (see DCLG, 2006

and Dawn Hands/BMG, 2001). E-government technologies should be having effects in these, more

traditional, channels too. But there is, at best, limited evidence that they have had this effect. For

example, recent Ipsos MORI research on public attitudes (Page, 2007) suggests that overall satisfaction

with public services has actually declined between 1998 and 2004 (see figure 1.). The picture which the

James Cornford and Paul Richter

research paints is, of course, more subtle than that bald assertion: there is a group for whom public

services have improved significantly, even if this group is outnumbered by those whose expectations

have not been met. A similar mixed picture emerged from the Cabinet Office’s (2004) attempt to

review user satisfaction across a range of public services. However, this research did note that in

respect of local government, which both delivers a lot of citizen interaction and has seen substantial

investment in Customer Service technologies, ‘overall satisfaction … has dropped notably over the past

three years’ (2004: 6).

Figure 1: Satisfaction with Public Services (Source: Page, 2007)

Responses to the Question ‘Thinking generally about what you expect of public services like local

councils, schools, would you say they greatly exceed or slightly exceed your expectations, are about

what you expect, fall slightly short or fall a long way short of your expectations?’ Base: 2004 - all

respondents (1,502); 1998 (5,064).

What is clear is that the investments that have been made in the technologies of ‘customer focus’

and the techniques of Customer Relationship Management have not (yet) led to the expected

improvements in measured levels of customer satisfaction. The British government seems puzzled by

the apparent contradiction. Its most recent initiative in this area is the formation of Citizen Panels

which directly confront the relationship between the individual and the state in terms of three core

questions. First among these is the question of customer care:

1. How can public services make a step change on customer care?

…

2. What can the state and individuals do to change culture, expectations and aspirations?

How far can the state go in tackling damaging behaviour, and promoting positive, and

what should be left to individuals and communities?

….

3. How should we update the relationship between citizens and the state, focusing on rights

and responsibilities?

…

(Page, 2007)

This initiative follows on from the local government ‘e-citizen’ project (http://www.e-

citizen.gov.uk/ [Accessed 17 January 2007]) which bills itself as ‘raising awareness and driving take-

up of Local Authority e-channels’. The ‘E-citizen’ project includes a ‘take-up campaign’ advertising

the existence of e-channels through which individuals can interact with local government services, a set

of ‘e-citizen’ ‘proof of concept’ research studies and a set of ‘e-Citizen Live’ dissemination events.

There are even some signs that the current government love affair with the customer label might

be waning. The 2006 review for HM Treasury by Sir David Varney is suggestive of a new caution

about the use of the customer label. Varney argues that the customer identity is, for public services a

‘partial’ identity and that an exclusive focus on the individual customer can obscure the wider needs of

‘citizens and businesses.’ Varney is clear that ‘there is a lot public services can learn from the best parts

Int. Journal of Business Science and Applied Management / Business-and-Management.com

of the private sector on how to engage and deliver services for the customer.’ Nevertheless, he

continues:

Many of those in public services also focus on the customer. However, within the public service

this is often taken to mean the individual who receives a particular benefit or entitlement, rather

than considering the needs of the individual as a whole. People rarely identify themselves as being

customers of a particular government service. Often they are trying to deal with a task or an event

that does not fall neatly and obviously on any one part of government, such as becoming

unemployed, getting married, starting a business or dealing with bereavement. As these events

will often cut across departmental responsibilities, the focus has to be on understanding what the

individual needs. If the government continues to interpret the term ‘customer’ as being limited to

those who transact with government at single points then government will continue to serve

citizens and businesses without fully addressing their needs (Varney, 2006: 23).

For Varney then, the ‘customer’ works against a fully ‘rounded’ view of the citizen by focusing

only on that aspect of the individual which a particular department or agency interacts with: not so

much a customer focus as customer blinkers. Yet Varney’s perspective does not challenge the notion of

Customer Focus (or in Varney’s preferred terms , Customer Insight) – rather it argues for a more

‘joined-up’ approach to implementing customer focus based on ‘setting some common standards to

ensure that public sector organisations can deliver genuinely joined-up services’ (2006: 31).

To what extent there is widespread public acceptance of the customer label is also not clear. The

Ipsos MORI research (Page, 2007) suggests that, when confronted with statements such as ‘Britain’s

public services need to start treating users and the public as customers’ some 81% of those surveyed

(adults 16+) agreed. (On the conceptualisation and measurement of customer satisfaction in the public

sector in the UK see Donovan, Brown and Bellulo, 2001; MORI, 2002; Van Ryzin, 2006). However,

more in depth research has shown that at least some individuals, in at least some specific public service

contexts, are wary of the customer label. John Clarke and Janet Newman (2005), for example, found

that health service users are far more inclined to think of themselves as ‘patients’ or ‘service users’ than

‘consumers’ or ‘customers’. Neither ‘citizens’ nor ‘consumers’ are “the primary categories through

which [people] live, and think about, their connections to public services”. Clarke and Newman

conclude that the resilience of people’s conceptions of ‘publicness’, ‘membership’, and ‘collaboration’

are both a resource and a problem for New Labour’s approach – “the assertiveness of health users (their

willingness to ‘stand up’) is constantly glossed by New Labour as ‘consumerist’, but the desires and

anxieties about both the present state of the NHS and its imagined futures suggest a failure to install a

consumerist subjectivity” (2005: 13).

To summarise the situation crudely, over half a decade of attempts to bring about technology-

enabled re-orientation of public services around the needs of the customer not only has failed to see

customer satisfaction in public services rise significantly, but has actually seen it decrease. In homage

to Robert Solow’s famous encapsulation of the productivity paradox, we might say ‘we can see the

technologies and techniques of customer focus everywhere in public services, except in the customer

satisfaction numbers.’ Why? This question is taken up in the next section.

3 COMPETING EXPLANATIONS FOR A LACK OF SATISFACTION

A range of explanations for this paradox have been suggested, each identifying a different culprit.

One answer is simply to deny that the very visible investment in contact centres, CRM software,

customer service training, and so on has brought about any discernable change in the individual

customer’s experience of local government. A variant of this perspective would hold that it is too early

to be looking for decisive evidence of changes in customer satisfaction. The key point for this school is

that the apparent rapid pace of change in terms of structures and technologies within the public services

masks a much slower process of cultural change. Such a cultural change has to overcome a deep rooted

resistance to change within the public services. In some versions of this story, such resistance may be

conscious and explicitly or implicitly organised (the bureaucrats are hanging on to their privileges for

grim death) or unconscious and disorganised, but nevertheless powerful. The implicit solution set for

this school includes: maintaining the pressure for customer service; further structural change to

‘unfreeze’ deeply held habits within the public services (e.g., through the introduction of greater

choice); and further promotion of the disciplines of customer service among front line staffs (e.g.,

through customer training). In short a cultural strategy focused on changing the culture of public

service workers.

James Cornford and Paul Richter

An alternative solution shifts the focus from the ‘customer-facing’ workers to the technologies

themselves and their suppliers, both within and outside the public services. The most eloquent exponent

here is Richard Heeks (2006). Heeks begins his recent book on implementing e-government with the

bald assertion that ‘most e-government projects fail’ (2006: 3). The dominant reason for these failures,

according to Heeks, is what he describes as ‘design-reality gaps’ – in short the failure to adequately

capture the organisational and individual ‘requirements’ at the design stage leading to technologies

which are not ‘fit for purpose’ when it comes to implementation. Other explanations which focus on

the technology either concentrate on the quality of design (e.g., web site usability

, etc.) or, more

typically, on the capacity of public servants to manage large and complex IT projects. In some variants

of this perspective, a portion of blame is placed on the IT and systems supplier community (providers

of hardware, software and, most importantly, consultancy) who are accused, at best, of overselling the

capabilities of their products and services.

If the management of the design and implementation of the technologies and techniques of e-

government is to blame, the solution is focused on improving the design and implementation capacity

of public services and their ability to manage IT systems and services contractors.

Each of these explanations focuses on processes and forces within the public services and their

supplier community. A final set of explanations focuses on relations outside the public services

themselves. A first version of this outward perspective examines communication between public

services and the public. In this explanation, the public are unaware of the benefits of new customer-

focused technologies because they have not experienced them. The solution, then, is clear: advertising

and other marketing activities such as the ‘connect to your council’ campaign, (part of the E-Citizen

project mentioned above). A second externally focused explanation looks even further. This final

perspective is framed in terms of the ‘relative’ performance of public services when set against (the

best of) private services. This argument does not deny that the investments in customer service have

produced improvements in the customer experience of public services over time (i.e., when compared

with the customer experience of the same services years earlier) but argues that this is irrelevant. For

this school of thought, customer satisfaction (CS) is determined by the simple equation

CS = expectation – experience

It is, then, customer service performance relative to expectations, that is important, and if

expectations rise faster than the quality of our experiences of customer service, then customer

satisfaction will decrease, even with improvements in customer experiences. The final point in this

perspective is to argue that our expectations of customer service are set, not by out past experience of

public service interactions, but by (the very best of) our interactions with the private sector. In short:

why can’t public services be as good as amazon.co.uk or as personalised as myspace.com?

Each of these explanations – whether focused on customer facing staff, the design and

implementation of IT or the communications or the marketing functions of public services and

customer expectations and comparisons – retains the basic framework of the customer service model.

What if it is this model itself, rather than the ways in which it is implemented, that is at the heart of the

problem of low take-up of, and poor satisfaction with, the outcomes of e-government enabled customer

service?

4 A THEORY OF REPRESENTATION

There is, of course, nothing new about questioning the adoption of the customer model in public

services (see, for example, Aberbach and Christensen, 2005; Alford, 2002; Fountain, 2001, du Gay

2000 for some flavour of the various critiques). The general tenor of these critiques has been to

highlight the collective, that is public, nature of public services on the one hand, and the significance of

egalitarianism in the distribution of public services (contrasted with strategies of ‘customer

segmentation’ in private services) on the other.

In this paper we want to take a different tack. We want to focus on what, in practice, adopting a

technology-supported customer service strategy actually means. What, exactly, is the focus of customer

focus technologies? The obvious reply is that customer focus implies focusing on the customer. This is,

however, too simple an answer. To begin to develop a more sophisticated response we will make a

A major UK government website cull announced in January 2007 entails a reduction from 951 to 26

websites and the streamlining of information through two ‘supersites’.

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short detour via Gregory Bateson’s 1972 essay, pathologies of epistemology (in his Steps to an Ecology

of Mind, 2000[1972].

Bateson begins his essay thus:

First I would like you to join me in a little experiment. Let me ask you for a show of hands. How

many of you will agree that you see me? I see a number of hands – so I guess that insanity loves

company. Of course, you don’t “really” see me. What you “see” is a bunch of pieces of

information about me, which you synthesise into a picture of me. You make that image. It’s that

simple (Bateson, 2000[1972]: 456).

What Bateson is so elegantly alluding to is the motivated aspect of vision or seeing. What we see

is, to some extent, the product of our own activity of organising sense data into something meaningful

for us. From this point of view, while the environment is certainly ‘out there’ (it is, fundamentally, a

realist ontology), our perception of it is always the work of choosing and ordering which elements to

bring into focus and which to ignore or leave as a blur, of making decisions about where to draw the

boundaries between objects and between figure and ground. We make those choices and impose

meaning on the constant stream of sense data that bombard us. We make the image. It is that simple.

We make that image. But we do not, of course, make that image alone or without help. The most

basic categories and frameworks which we use to make sense of sense data are, to a very large extent,

inherited from the wider culture. In the context of the organisation, this general cultural framework, or

common sense, is supplemented (and sometimes contradicted) by more specialist, domain specific

organisational or professional frameworks and taxonomies. Thus, what is true of individuals is, in this

case, also true of organisations. Organisations don’t react to “the environment” – they react to a

representation of the environment (see e.g., Manturana and Varela, 1998 for one interesting take on this

phenomenon). This representation is not a mere refection of the environment but rather a carefully

constructed image of the environment built on often painstaking collection of data and its subsequent

organisation into charts and tables, facts and narratives. What we must always remember, however, is

that it is within the organisation that the choices about which facts and which narratives to select are

made.

In so far as ‘the customer’ is seen as a part of the organisational environment, it too is a

representation, constructed using a selection of ‘customer’ data drawn from a variety of mechanisms,

but selected and ordered according to a representation that is built and maintained within the

organisation. Thus, while the concept of customer focus is intended to orient the organisation

externally, to do this it must first orient the organisation internally, towards its own processes and

techniques and the categories and narratives which underlie them. Before the organisation can turn

outwards, it must turn inwards. Strictly speaking, then, public services thus cannot be built “around the

customer” – they must be built around a representation of the customer.

The need for such a representation predates the introduction of e-government. However, prior to

the adoption of computer-based CRM Systems and the like, the representations of public service users

remained diffuse, localised and shared through a mixture of bureaucratic process (forms and filing) and

the shared norms introduced by professional training and supported by professional practice. The

technologies of e-government have imposed a new requirement for a much more explicit and shared

representation of the customer. As Paul Dourish has argued,

…there is simply no questioning the central role of representation in developing computer

systems. Software is a representational medium, from the interface on the screen to the bits on the

disk. What is called for then is a more nuanced understanding of the role that those representations

play, how they are subject to a variety of interpretations, and how they figure as part of a larger

body of practice (Dourish, 2004: 208).

The adequacy of the representations which are embodied in information systems is a well

established academic concern. Academic computer scientists explicitly worry about ‘ontologies’

(although there is less evidence of these concerns feeding through into much of the software that is

deployed in typical e-government implementations).

If the organisational routines of customer service and, the information systems on which they are

built, rely on representations, then our concern here is with three important questions. Who gets to

build these representations? What tools and materials are used to build these representations and what

constraints do these impose? What are the consequences when these individuals and groups build these

representations with these tools and materials and they are employed in practice?

James Cornford and Paul Richter

5 “CUSTOMER INTIMACY”: KNOWING THE CUSTOMER AND SEEING LIKE A STATE

Customer Relationship Management is based on the goal or target of knowing your customer, of

establishing what Varney (2006: 24) calls customer insight, or in Laudon and Laudon’s unfortunate

phrase, ‘customer intimacy’ (2007: 260). We cannot, post-Foucault, see such knowledge, let alone such

intimate knowledge, as a purely innocent appropriation of facts from a stable, objectively knowable

world. Foucault’s coupling of knowledge with power should orient us to the extent to which knowledge

constitutes its object. Indeed it is possible to make a coherent argument that contemporary Customer

Relationship Management technologies do not record information about the customer but rather call

that identity into being, shaping a new customer subjectivity (Zwick and Dholakia, 2004).

Our argument here is less radical. Let us start by drawing attention to the visual metaphor behind

the notion of ‘customer focus’. Knowledge about the customer is to be gained by looking. But as we

have argued, seeing is an active process: in an important sense we see what we are looking for. In

figure 2, for example, those who are told to look for a man playing a saxophone (perhaps even

implicitly, for example by viewing the picture in the context of other pictures of musicians) will tend to

see a man playing a saxophone. By contrast, those told or led to expect a picture of a woman’s head are

more likely to see that image. You can only recognise what you have already ‘cognised’ (i.e., that of

which you have established a mental model). The paradox is that, in order to make sense of the external

world we must first look inward to our taxonomies, models and schemas.

Figure 2: Is it Bill (playing the sax) … or Hilary?

Customer service technologies embody just such taxonomies and models. Customer Relationship

Management systems which are precisely designed to focus the organisation’s attention on the

(external) customer, similarly require the organisation to first focus on the (internal) model of the

customer. And this model is, to a very large extent, one that is built into the systems which support

Customer Focus. These technologies increasingly form the ‘lens’ through which public services focus

on their users.

There is, of course, a substantial literature on how the state envisages its populations, in James

Scott’s (1998) memorable phrase ‘seeing like a state’. As Scott has argued

certain forms of knowledge require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel

vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex

and unwieldy reality.’ (Scott, 1998, 11)

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However this literature has focused on the state’s vision of aggregates of individuals –

populations, groups, classes – and the (statistical) technologies and techniques used to order and

represent them en mass (see e.g., Porter, 1995; Bowker and Star, 2002). The technologies and

techniques of Customer Focus and Customer Relationship Management take Scott’s notion of focus to

a new and much more individualised level.

Which aspects of the public service user are brought into sharp focus by these technologies and

which aspects are softened or rendered less visible? The customer that is brought into being is, of

course, the classical homo economicus of positive economics. This public service user is envisaged as

individual, characterised by means-ends rationality, coherence, self-knowledge and self-interest.

Additionally the model of the customer that emerges from the rhetoric of customer service in public

services is time pressured, demanding and constantly susceptible to rising expectations. This is the

model that CRM systems and their associated technologies are built on and this is what they are

looking for, what they are ready to re-cognise.

6 COMPUTER SAYS “NO”

If the techniques and technologies of customer service enable public services to see certain aspects

of their users, they also obscure other aspects. Behaviours that are not comprehensible in terms of the

self interested, self-knowing individual become meaningless or their meaning is blurred. To shift the

metaphor from vision to hearing, we can point to the increasingly noted opinion of public service users

that ‘they’re not listening,’ that the management of public services are unable to process and

comprehend certain aspects of what their users are trying to tell them (see e.g., McHugh, 2006). To mix

the two metaphors then – ‘they’re not listening because they can’t see us’.

This effect is not restricted to public services. The disempowered worker, portrayed in the

television comedy programme Little Britain, whose catch phrase is ‘computer says “no”,’ is as likely to

work in the private as the public sector. Linda Penny (2005) has beautifully captured the mock sincerity

– in her phrase, the ‘corporate bullshit’ – of private sector customer service with its refrain of “your call

is important to us.” As Harry Frankfurt (2005) has pointed out, what makes this kind of statement into

Bullshit is not that it isn’t true. After all, your call really is, in the end, important to the organisation.

What makes it bullshit is the lack of sincerity behind it. Your call is important to us, not because you

are important, but because your business is important to us. All that changes with the transfer to the

public sector or the monopoly infrastructure provider is that what is important about your call is

reflected not in the ‘bottom line’ but in the performance management statistics or the volume of

complaints to the regulator.

What is to be done? First it is clear that representation as such is not the problem. Organisations

can only interact with their environments through the mediation of a representation of that

environment. The vision of a more direct and “authentic” interaction with the users of public services is

another kind of Bullshit (Frankfurt, 2005). Rather than try to avoid the problems of representation by

going around it, we propose to tackle representation head on.

One approach here would be to join those who extol ‘the active citizen’ and the much more direct

participation of individuals in the governance and management of public services, through mechanisms

such as the membership of boards and citizen juries. In this sense, then, users might seek to increase

their ‘representation’ within public services. This approach has it limits. As Declan McHugh has

recently argued, the desire to be heard does not imply that people are keen to participate more directly

in the governance and management of public services:

While the call for more participatory democracy has a visceral

emotional appeal, in practice it may

only succeed in engaging

those already over-represented amongst voters and party members—that

is, the educated, affluent and middle-aged. Mechanisms designed

to provide greater opportunities

for citizens to participate

more directly in decision making as a means of increasing legitimacy

and

reducing the perceived democratic deficit may therefore

have the opposite effect (McHugh, 2006:

551).

Such approaches also underestimate the extent to which experiences are shaped by operational

decisions taken by professionals, rather than policy decisions taken by governing bodies. Even if we

were to endorse widespread acceptance of the ‘active citizen’ role, we would emphasise the importance

of first examining how this role relates to the models which underpin the techniques and technologies

that mediate service users’ interaction with state bodies.

James Cornford and Paul Richter

The problem then, for us, is much more one of opening up representation at the level of the

models – representations that are embedded in the standard operating procedures of customer service

and its associated technologies. Perhaps the most important component of this is to reverse the desire

for ‘intimate’ or ‘personal’ knowledge that is deeply embedded in the theory and practice of customer

service. Richard Sennett (2004) has, as usual, got to the heart of the matter. For Sennett the problem

with such knowledge is that it shows a lack of respect for the autonomy of the other, the public service

user. It doesn’t give space to the other to present themselves as an autonomous being because the

public service organisation already ‘knows’, or thinks that it knows, what the user is like. Sennet puts it

as follows:

Autonomy, as we have seen is not simply an action; it requires also a relationship in which one

party accepts that he or she cannot understand something about the other. The acceptance that one

cannot understand things about another gives both standing and equity in the relationship.

Autonomy presupposes at once connections and strangeness. (2004: 177)

What is necessary is not that the public services gain intimate knowledge, constructed through the

categories and classifications of customer service with their ready-made understandings of the needs of

the user, but rather that the user is given some space to define themselves and their priorities. This

requires, ironically, that public services show more humility about their levels of understanding of the

priorities and needs of users – in Sennett’s phrase ‘the acceptance that they cannot understand things

about the other’. The danger is that throwing more ‘understanding the customer’ technology at

customer service will actually undermine the capacity of public services to listen to their users and

7 CONCLUSION: LEARNING TO ‘REALLY’ LISTEN?

Let us briefly rehearse the argument. Customer service in public services is only working in so far

as the model – the representation of the customer – of the customer on which it is based is meaningful

to that customer. When the model is not meaningful it creates dissonance – the public service provider

can only see and register their effect on the customer in the terms provided by their model of the

customer. Public service user responses that fall outside the parameters of the representation or model

become meaningless or have their meaning blurred. This generates the ‘they’re-not-listening’ effect

that surveys of public service users have noted.

This kind of effect cannot be reduced by “better marketing” but only by rethinking the model of

the customer in a more complex way. That rethinking will involve actually engaging with “customers”

and letting them take a role in building the way they are represented. This is, of course, a political

process. But it need not imply the dreadful vision of more ‘participation’ in focus groups and meetings

as much as the recognition that each service encounter needs a little space for the negotiation of the

representation of the user – which might go well beyond the bounds of the customer stereotype.

There are some signs that, in parts of the public sector reform movement, this kind of realisation is

being taken seriously. Some of the conclusions to a recent study for local government (Back/RBA,

2006) chime well with this view. For example, the research showed that young people ‘want to set the

agenda not just respond to yours’ [that is, the council’s]. Even more tellingly, e-democracy national

project leader is quoted as saying: ‘Rather than concentrating on mechanisms to help them speak,

authorities should focus on improving their ability to listen, understand and engage…’ (Back/RBA

Research, 2006: 7-8)

Yes, of course, most people will respond to the ‘customer’ label to some extent, if it implies an

improved choice of access channels; more efficient delivery and other benefits that are relevant to them

as individuals. Some data do suggest that some users of public services do want to be treated more as

they are by private sector service providers some of the time. But when they are engaged with on a

deeper level it seems that they do not relate so easily to the idea of being a ‘customer’ (Clarke &

Newman, 2005). They see their relationship with the state differently. So even if uptake of e-channels

begins to improve over coming years, feelings of satisfaction towards the public’s relationship with

public services may not necessarily follow without a re-thinking of the basis of that relationship.

How can public service organisations solve this satisfaction gap? This paper is not the place to

prescribe detailed solutions – a task, no doubt, for a major socio-technical research programme. What

we would suggest here, however, is that by approaching e-government by way of the ‘customer’ model

that infuses the concept of customer service (and its associated techniques and technologies) at the core

of the programme, we start to appreciate how the service user is being represented – and hence

understood – by public service organisations. And this is a good place, we argue, from which to begin

Int. Journal of Business Science and Applied Management / Business-and-Management.com

to understand why service users may not be fully satisfied with their relationships with those

organisations. It leads us to question whether a set of customer-focused practices that have emerged in

a commercial setting and which rest on a particular notion of the relationship between server and

served can be expected to reliably deliver satisfaction in a public services setting. Further, it suggests

that any attempt by government policymakers and practitioners in public services to re-think how the

complexity of the service user’s role(s) may be more adequately accommodated, needs to be sensitive

to the ways in which those roles are re-presented within the technologies and techniques of e-

government. Finally, we would suggest that those technologies and techniques should be based on

listening to, understanding, and engaging with those users – enabling the user to represent themselves

and not to always have the work of representation done for them.

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