"Ignorance is not bliss"

This post is inspired by my colleague, Tom Tobia's, recent article in Design Week about how customer satisfaction can be improved by keeping people constantly informed about the service they are using or receiving, particularly the reasons why it might be temporarily substandard or seem illogical and frustrating.

Tom's article focusses on the strict controls that many budget airlines now have in place regarding hand luggage, for example why two small pieces of hand luggage are not allowed on board, even if they are smaller in total than a larger permitted piece. Without an adequate explanation, as Tom describes, the customer is left frustrated and dis-empowered.

This reminded me, that to my delight, of an airborne public service that has responded well to demands for transparency to ease the nuisance it causes to the general public, and it is the good old Metropolitan Police helicopters. There was a time where I would lie in bed, unable to sleep because of the loud whirring sound of the police helicopter overhead - it sometimes felt like living through an episode of M*A*S*H (or an army base in a warzone, to you youngsters). I would go on to Twitter to vent my frustrations and see if anyone was suffering a similar disturbance, but more importantly to find out why the police needed to use helicopters over Islington for what felt like "every night." I would just search the words "Islington" or "police helicopter" and would quickly be talking to (well tweeting at) many people who were suffering from the same disturbance. I quickly found out that I wasn't alone. A third of the complaints about the police helicopters in London were coming from Islington (that might say more something about us as a borough though...). Blog posts and discussions would start to appear on local sites, political parties also took up the cause, a King's Cross neighbourhood site brought up the topic in an interview with the Islington Borough Commander. The Islington Gazette picked up the story.

Discussion between local residents about the police helicopter noise on www.islingtonpeople.co.uk

Finally, a blog post on the Islington People site directed people with concerns to the new @MPSinthesky Twitter account. This was great news. Finally, someone answering our call to be kept out of the dark about these night time visitors from above. The Islington Gazette then reported that this simple measure had considerably and suddenly reduced the number of complaints about the helicopter coming from Islington residents. I love the police sergent's comments in the Gazette's story:

"Sgt Brandon said he was reluctant to adopt the scheme initially. “To be honest it was not my first choice. I am not from the Twitter generation and I don’t really understand it. But we ran out of excuses and we have been blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response.”

See - this service design theory stuff is quite common sense really - just listen to what people are saying and give them the information that they are asking for so that their experience of your 'service' is improved.

Tom also touches on A&E departments. My recent experience of the NHS is that whilst a very good level of care is generally provided, the communication about and administration of the process is very poor. You do not always know why you need to wait for hours, or even how long your wait is likely to be and what is happened next.

I had an operation that I had been waiting a year for cancelled by UCLH in December. It had taken me a lot of effort to fit this operation in with my schedule and to arrange for my parents to come and care for me once discharged. The last minute news of this cancellation was quite upsetting. But if the person telephoning me had told me that my operation was moved because of someone with a more urgent condition (i.e. cancer) needing treatment before the Christmas break, I would have been a lot more understanding. I think we are all fairly reasonable human beings once we are treated like reasonable human beings, rather than passive subjects, and we are kept in the loop.

My other big current gripe with poor levels of customer services are residential block managing agents. Most people who own a flat in London are leaseholders and hold very little power decide what happens to the communal areas of their property, but are regularly landed with the large bill to pay for what is happening (or even in some cases, even what is not). The freeholder for our small block uses a managing agent to look after her responsibilities of insuring and maintaining communal parts of the building. Every year we get issued with bills that are very difficult to interpret, asking for large amounts of money to cover items that we are not always familiar with, and for rises in the service charges / management fees of up to 40%. When these bills arrive, they only remind me of all of the repair tasks that the managing agents have failed to perform during the eight years I have lived in the flat, and we enter into a period of debate. This year, I am querying a £970 repairs bill (I only recall one carpet rip being repaired in the year and numbers being added to the front door), and the introduction of a new annual circa £500 health and safety report charge (the communal area is a small stair case with two lights).

However, if they just took the time to set out the bill in a user friendly design, and explain the (genuine and understandable) reasons for the increases, repairs spend or new charges to us in plain English; give us a copy of the Health and Safety report and show us what value this is providing us; show us that they did go to some effort to get us the best buildings insurance price on offer; (and actually conducted all of the outstanding repairs...) this annual to-and-fro that probably is the majority of work their management fee pays for, would be avoided. Most of us don't mind paying for things if we are: a) understanding of the reasons why we must pay; b) feel that the service we are getting is worth the price we pay; and c) feel that we have some level of control over what we pay for. In a leaseholder set up, this is very often not the case. (Note - we can't get a Right to Manage arrangement in our block because of ground floor commercial property - but any recommendations of good Managing Agents in London gratefully received - they seem impossible to find and many of the online review sites seem to be infiltrated by the false reviews.)

One final note of caution. Informing people of what you are doing is not always going to win you their approval, particularly if they do not feel that what you are doing is reasonable. I remember listening to a talk by Ben Page of IPSOS Mori when I was a councillor about how councils improve their reputation ratings by communicating to people about what they do. This is true, of course, to an extent - people do like to know what they are paying for. However, you can bang on all you like about an unpopular or poorly performing service, but this alone is unlikely to gain people's support. You still need to involve, engage, and work with service users, so you can understand what it is like to really live in their shoes, experiencing your services, from their perspective. Being kept in the dark might be the reason why they are dissatisfied, but you won't find out if there is more to it until you really, and I mean really, listen to them.