Westminster City Council – Putting citizens needs first

With help from PA Consulting Group, Westminster City Council (WCC) is leading the way in showing how Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can enable public sector organisations to transform themselves around the needs of their customers. Just months after implementation, the project is delivering dramatic performance and cost improvements.

At Westminster, its vision of putting the ‘Customer First’ – services designed to meet the needs of the citizen rather than of the service provider – has become reality, providing a role model for the rest of the public sector. In doing so, it has had to make CRM relevant to the public sector by developing a radical new organisational model, in which the whole of the council is organised around a new function of a ‘one-stop’ service centre. Customer-friendly representatives now commission services and ensure that council commitments are kept.

To implement this ‘Customer First’ programme, PA helped WCC design the new ways of working and set up one of the biggest local authority outsourcing deals ever, under which one supplier provides the entire Customer Service Centre together with many of the more straightforward council services.

Rob Brown, PA’s assignment leader, comments, “In the public sector, it is easy to talk about getting close to the customer. But to truly view the organisation through the eyes of the customer, and to act on what you see, takes real courage. With PA’s help, Westminster City Council has done so. We are proud that the result is being widely held up as a model for the local authority of the future.”

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