Before an audience of leading cities, regions, think tankers and experts, UserCentriCities convened a highly interactive workshop on Measuring Citizen Satisfaction: A Key to User-Centricity in Local Administrations.
The workshop was the second edition of a series of peer-to-peer workshops that the network is convening to exchange experiences and best practices and to identify challenges and possible solutions around the design and delivery of services that put citizens at their heart.
Guildo Seisdedos, director at the IE Center for C-Centricity at IE University in Madrid and Alfonso Vegara, founder of the Metropolis Foundation, delivered eye-opening presentations on lessons learnt from the private sector on measuring customer-satisfaction and how cities and regions can benefit from them.
Digitalisation and user experience have redefined how we measure citizen satisfaction. The more digitalised our cities are, the more citizens' satisfaction emerges as a key performance indicator. The same is true for user experience. While often related to IT aspects, there is another layer that is the emotional response of the user/citizen, how their expectations are met or not, the overall perception the citizens have on public services.
The C-centricity Net model introduces how the paradigm of businesses has room to improve the way cities are managed by refining customer satisfaction trends from the corporate arena and translating them to the local level.
C-centricity englobes customer, consumer and citizen. It has five guiding principles:
- C-centricity is leadership specific and must be a top strategic priority. This ensures its presence in the company/city’s vision and/or purpose.
- C-centric transformations suggest levers act sequentially and each lever builds on the previous one.
- All levers are interrelated and connect to each other but not all organisations will start at the same place or time.
- C-centric companies/cities must include internal stakeholders/ city officials as costumers/users. This type of fluid organisation aims for balanced centricity.
- C-centric companies rethink the way customer experience needs to be designed from the base, including how they search for teams.
Another substantial change brought by digitalisation is customer understanding. Deep customer understanding implies getting to know much more about customers/citizens, not with a traditional survey or focus groups, but how they interact with digital public services available, apps, webs, leads, how we deliver attention to them, which is not multichannel but omni-channel. Understanding the customer/citizen journey and developing metrics such as NPS (net promoter score) is key. Mapping the customer journey and working with touch points is a hot topic in the corporate arena and its methodology could bring great benefits to foster user-centricity in cities.
If you want to be part of the UserCentriCities network and take part in the upcoming workshops, please contact Chrysoula Mitta, associate director, the Lisbon Council at usercentricities@lisboncouncil.net