Government solutions - Customer Carewords

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Government: better service, more satisfied customers

Some years ago, we did a Customer Carewords project for a department of education. They had two core audiences: teachers and parents. (They used to have content for students but no self-respecting student would be found dead near a department of education website.)

Working with the department staff we drew up a list of the major things parents and teachers might want from their website. We got about 100 department staff, 100 parents and 100 teachers to vote on the list. The following table shows the five most important things for each group.

What do parents want? To support and protect their children. What do teachers want? Curriculum and teacher lesson plans. What to civil servants want to give teachers and parents? Reports, publications and policy. This is a classic example of organization-centric thinking, and it is what Customer Carewords is designed to identify and solve.

To deliver better services and have more satisfied customers, your government website needs to overcome the following challenges:

Organization-centric to customer-centric: The language of government is rarely the language of the customer. The way government thinks is rarely the way customers think.
Complexity to simplicity: Governments love complexity; customers hate it. A hard to understand, difficult to navigate website is almost doomed to failure from the outset.
Big to small: Government content has exploded on the Web. Every imaginable service, every imaginable policy document is often published simply to say that "it's up on the Web". A massive spring clean is required to remove the vast quantities of irrelevant, out of date and badly written government content.

Customer Carewords allows your customers to vote on the range of tasks you offer them when they come to your website. When they vote they will tell you very clearly what matters to them and what doesn't. They will vote conclusively for their top tasks and it will be very clear which tasks do not interest them.

To move from organization-centric to customer-centric you need to have a deep understanding of what your customers really want when they come to your website. Customer Carewords helps you do that. It helps you strip away the complexity and move away from a big sprawling website by identifying your customers' top tasks.

2007 International Government Carewords poll

In 2007, we carried out a Customer Carewords poll of hundreds of government web professionals in the United States, New Zealand and Canada. Out of a list of 22 phrases that described potential experiences of government websites, participants were asked to choose the top three words/phrases that best described their experience of government websites.

The top three phrases from Canadian government web professionals, with 38 percent of the vote, were:
Organization-centric;
Confusing;
Too many websites.

The bottom three, with 0 percent of the vote, were:
Easy to search;
Fast in, fast out;
Participative.

The top three phrases from New Zealand government web professionals, with 48 percent of the vote, were:
Organization-centric;
Complicated;
Comprehensive.

The bottom three, with 0 percent of the vote, were:
Easy to use;
Simple to navigate;
Well managed.

The top three phrases from United Sates government web professionals, with 46 percent of the vote, were:
Organization-centric;
Confusing;
Complicated.

The bottom three, with 0 percent of the vote, were:
Simple to navigate;
Friendly;
Participative.

Government websites: too addicted to PR?

Governments are addicted to proving that they are doing their job properly. Many government websites are politics-centric. They have big pictures of politicians on their homepages, and they talk about the 5-year plans they have just launched, rather than using the website to help implement the 5-year plan.

Too many government websites tell us about the legislation they are enacting. We are victims of a tsunami of policies, procedures and publications in a language that is often meaningless.

The best thing governments can do on the Web is get out of the way. Save the customers time by making basic government tasks fast and easy. That's what Customer Carewords helps you do. It puts the views of the customer front and center. It shows you what your customers really wants using hard, compelling data.

What Customer Carewords is
How Customer Carewords works
Pricing and deliverables
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