Why customer centricity is important to the public sector

In September 2023, I had the pleasure of introducing cxpartners’ Customer Centricity Model (CCM) to the public sector at SDinGov. Our model is designed to support organisations to improve their customer experience by prioritising areas in their capability to deliver excellent customer experiences.

The Customer Centricity Model was originally commissioned by Google and we've used it to conduct research into over 100 top European brands. Our research found that 64% of organisations are underperforming when it comes to customer centricity. The findings also reveal the scale of the advantage that highly customer centric companies have— with on average the top 36% achieving around 9x the annual year on year revenue growth compared to lower maturity companies.

These findings have been collated in our white paper 'The State of Customer Centricity', which lays out 5 key insights that will help you to answer the question: how can we be more customer centric?

Alongside the white paper, we have launched an assessment tool which enables organisations to receive a customer centricity score and a personalised report of recommendations for how they can improve. Find out more: https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/customer-centricity-model/

At cxpartners, we believe that centring around the customer within the public sector can make a real difference to strategy, governance and people. 

With over a decade of experience delivering service design and strategy into Public Services organisations, I understand that there are some fundamental differences between private sector and public sector organisations and how they define and interact with “the people they serve”.

But we also know through our research that the more focused on the customer experience an organisation is - the better they perform. For a public sector organisation, it’s not only about focusing on the services you provide - but also how you are organised, and how you make strategic decisions around your culture and your employee experience. 

It’s also about being smart about how you engage senior stakeholders. Organisations such as the Civil Aviation Authority have gained buy-in at board level by demonstrating the value of Customer Centricity both at an organisational level and in tactical pilots in delivery teams. This has resulted in Customer Experience becoming a board priority and the foundation for an upcoming modernisation programme.

GDS and Government Service Standards have provided a framework for the public sector and  transformed the way that services are created. The “user” is (and should be) always at the heart of the service - user needs should drive:

• Why the service exists
• What the service does
• How the service delivers 

In a well functioning and multi-disciplinary service team, user-centred design is at the heart of decision making. 

cxpartners has had the privilege of partnering with amazing public sector organisations and teams working to deliver excellent services to their users. 

But we’ve observed that although services and teams are often centred around the user and the wider GDS framework - this way of working and approach to design and transformation can get stuck at the service level. When you go wider into the organisation, you start to see top-down decision making, waterfall processes and inefficient internal processes. Ways of working and language that is common at service design level isn’t adopted or understood more widely.

We’ve seen organisations, such as arms length bodies, who don’t sit on GOV.UK or have a different funding model to central government, unable to create a service-led approach or breakaway from a technology-led transformation cycle. 

There are also scenarios where “user”  isn’t a useful term in understanding the whole context, journey and touchpoints that someone may make with an organisation. Such as:

• When the public sector body has a fee paying service
• When the service is government to business
• When there is the possibility or appearance of choice
• When funding is coming from the industry, a revenue-generating service or outside central cabinet office budgets

In these cases, the “users”  of the services that bring in revenue are vital to the effectiveness of the public sector organisation - they are the “customers”. In the private sector, our research shows that that mature, customer-centric organisations:

• Are nimble and can react to change more quickly
• Have higher employee satisfaction 
• Communicate more effectively

These are qualities and results that should resonate with leaders within the public sector too and in our webinar 'Prioritising at transformation level' on 29th November, we’ll be diving deeper into the difference between “user” and “customer”, introducing the five pillars of the model and sharing a recent example to bring it to life.

Sign up to the session now.