Background
Understanding customer service costs is an important condition for achieving sustainable productivity improvements. Information about costs helps organisations to prioritise resources, identify poorly performing services and inefficiencies, and assess the opportunities for innovation and digital transformation.
A service can be made up of many parts such as:
- initial application, either online or other
- customer query or helpdesk online function
- physical face-to-face service
- back-office function focusing on complex citizen applications
- systems running and support.
Each part has people supporting the processes and often merging data from different systems. All of these areas have the cost of running their aspect of the service and the cost of the people to support them. Without knowing how much each element costs it is difficult for departments to know where to focus to achieve cost-effective improvements.
Scope
The NAO has highlighted the importance of improving the productivity of public services and the need for a good understanding of the costs of those services. This report is an initial assessment of the need for better cost information and steps government can take. We bring together recent findings and recommendations, and consider:
- the limitations in government’s understanding of service costs and previous attempts to improve cost information
- how government can address these limitations drawing on established techniques and good practice.
NAO team
Director: Yvonne Gallagher
Audit Manager: Jonathan Pownall