Customer insight is an ongoing programme that evolves with changes to citizen and customer needs, a council's political priorities, and the local, regional and national policy landscape. It should be built into everyday mechanisms for performance management, decision making and engagement.
Councils that are successfully using customer insight are generally characterised by:
- strong leadership
- a senior director with responsibility for actively driving insight
- a chief executive with an active interest in it.
People and skills
In practice, customer insight is often developed by an internal team - recognised experts with knowledge of the tools and techniques, access to data, and the ability to bring the two together.
However, some of the required skills often already exist within a council or its partners - for example, policy and performance, consultation, research and customer service.
Councils need not necessarily gain a lot of new skills, but they will need people to:
- analyse and manipulate data
- present and use data to inform strategy and policy
- understand and use market research techniques and methods
- communicate the results of customer insight analysis in a way that makes an impact on the audience
- enthuse others and engage effectively with staff members throughout the organisation.
Processes
Established processes are vital to collecting, analysing and disseminating information, and using this to inform a council's activities. Business processes that should be informed by customer insight include:
- service planning
- business cases
- engagement and empowerment.
Data and systems
Good data is the foundation of customer insight analysis. Information collected about citizens must be stored and shared within and between organisations. Data sets - particularly those purchased externally - need to be held in one place and made available to the whole organisation.
Understanding an individual customer's interactions with the council - a 'single customer view' - is critical to setting up a single 'clean' data source on a customer. This can then be used to develop reliable customer analysis.
Getting started
This is a standard way for a council to approach a customer insight project:
- Identify the objectives for using insight and the related question or issue.
- Work out how better understanding your customers will help you.
- Undertake an audit to establish what people, processes and data you already have, the data you need and where to get it. This includes identifying the tools you will use.
- Develop a model for customer insight in your organisation and a plan for achieving it.
- Undertake a pilot to help build skills and stimulate demand for customer insight throughout your council.
LG Inform Plus
LG Inform Plus is designed to help the local government sector meet the challenges of performance monitoring, evidence collection, knowledge exchange and central reporting.
Delivery Council workplan
The Delivery Council, on behalf of the Cabinet Office, has published the following guidance, Delivery Council workplan: Establishing Customer Insight as a Strategic Asset in Public Service Design, on the National Archives website