Invest in public trust to create public value

01 July 2009, 10:43am

Direct investment in citizen relationship management solutions will help to build trust in hard pressed local authorities, says Northgate Public Services today, as it mounts a drive to encourage greater citizen involvement and engagement in councils’ performance improvement.

Over 80 local authorities and housing clients are working in public value partnerships to revolutionise service delivery through using Northgate’s citizen relationship management solutions, says the company. Northgate now serves over 11.6 million citizens in England and Wales – almost one in five of the population.

The company believes that many more citizens could benefit if other hard-pressed public services and not-for-profit organisations overhauled their processes and comprehensively re-engineered their services around the sole target of improving public satisfaction and trust in public services.

According to its local authority and housing clients, the positive outcomes arising from such partnerships include:

· providing one-stop services for citizens, including self service for an extended number of services and online payments services;

· joining up front-office and back-office systems to allow staff instant access to citizen information to improve the service they provide;

· reducing the time taken to deliver services;

· providing citizen-centred services with service delivery built around the needs and choice of the individual citizen and their family;

· tracking the progress of customer queries more quickly and effectively;

· delivering performance and other management information;

· reducing the bureaucratic burden on staff;

· and delivering efficiencies whilst improving services.

Northgate believes that the police and social care sector could particularly benefit from engaging in such partnerships and it is mounting a campaign to persuade them of the benefits.

Russell Osborne, Managing Director of Citizen Solutions at Northgate Public Services said today: “Talking about direct investment in the current economic climate is absolutely necessary. We cannot have more of the same, if the same is characterised by silo mentality, paper processes and outmoded methods of working.

“Our local authority clients’ experience is that this is investment well spent, helping to build public satisfaction and create better and more efficient services when the public needs them most.

“At a time when social care services are heavily focusing on the personalisation agenda, and the police service has adopted a single customer satisfaction target, we believe the public sector has much to gain from a greater emphasis on building services based on satisfaction.”

www.northgate-is.com

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