9: Brand-Led Service Delivery
[Apply] a brand-led approach to design and deliver services that users will engage with. Other Information:
Insight into citizen and business needs helps develop a detailed and segmented understanding of citizens and businesses as
customers of government services. A lack of focus on customers often leads to duplicated and inefficient government services
delivered through inappropriate channels. Understanding customer needs, and how to design and deliver services that users
will engage with, requires a brand-led approach. A brand is something much deeper and more fundamental than logos, badging
and corporate identity. It is the underlying promise made by an organization to its customers about the products and services
it delivers, as reflected in the reality of how customers experience those products and services. Branding is a discipline
in which governments lag behind the best of the private sector. Whereas brand development in the private sector is an explicit
and vital driver of overall product and service strategy, the public sector has largely ignored a painful fact: that its services
constitute a brand, whether they acknowledge this or not, and one that is all-too-often perceived negatively. In a brand-led
company, customer insight informs all aspects of the product development process, and involves a comprehensive program of
qualitative and quantitative research to understand and segment the customer base. Lessons learned from this are fed into
a brand-led product management process - not as a one-off input of initial research, but through a continuous process of iterative
design and customer testing. A key output from this is a set of brand values for the product or service, which then need to
drive all aspects of service delivery, support, and marketing. This is all managed as an iterative process of continuous improvement.
If governments are to succeed in the ambition of shifting service delivery decisively away from traditional channels to lower-cost
digital channels, then these branding challenges must be met. Often, governments may face significant gaps in terms of the
people and skills needed to manage brand-led product development and marketing cycles of this nature, so identifying and addressing
these gaps as part of the Skills strategy is vital. It is also vitally important that the drive to brand-led service delivery
is led at a whole-of-government level: the element of the Guiding Principles which points to the need to “own the customer
at the whole-of-government” level is therefore of particular significance for this pattern. The cultural change required by
brand-led service delivery will be facilitated and accelerated through Customer Empowerment.
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