A one stop shop
June 13th, 2011 at 11:00 am by David FarrarTom Pullar-Strecker at Stuff reports:
A planned “one-stop shop” to handle all public dealings with government departments could affect thousands of state servants.
The new ServiceLink organisation – a mega call-centre which could ultimately employ several thousand staff – is being set up in a plan for the one agency to handle everything from phone and internet inquiries to applications for benefits, tax returns, fines and other payments for state services.
In a way this would be catching up with local Government.
In the old days, there were dozens of phone numbers for say the Wellington City Council, depending on what service you wanted. Now there is just one phone number and the call centre deals with almost all inquiries.
- The government could save $100 million a year from “efficiencies” that would include avoiding the duplication of information technology systems and merging call centres. But officials said the goal was also to make services more convenient for the public.
Saving money is not a bad thing though, even if not the main aim.
Ms Pilott said the union supported initiatives that helped “join up services” and made life easier for the public. “But that change shouldn’t be used as an excuse to cut jobs.
“If jobs become surplus because of new initiatives, those workers should be redeployed to provide more extended services to the public. Also, if ServiceLink is going to be a success, an enhanced working environment … is vital for improving service delivery.”
I’m not sure if Ms Pilott is saying that the call centrc should have more staff than necessary, or calling for any savings from it to be invested elsewhere. The latter is what has been happening over the last two years anyway – there are 3,000 fewer public servants but there are (off memory) 1,500 more teachers, 1,000 more nurses, 500 more doctors, 300 more Police etc.
Tags: state sector
June 13th, 2011 at 11:05 am
I guess my concern is whether there will be enough people to answer the calls and give the right specialised advice and support.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 11:18 am
I rather suspect this will be a terrible idea in practice.
1) by centralising everything, the mega centre increases the government’s vulnerability to industrial action. No wonder Pilott is not opposed to an idea that will probably make many of her flock redundant: it will also massively increase her power to disrupt and therefore extract concessions. Centralising operations gives Pilott the ability to essentially shut down communications with the government. She likey.
2) the promised economies will almost certainly not emerge, because there are also diseconomies of scale in public service. New investment in systems and organisation to handle the centralisation will overwhelm benefits from elimination of duplication, in exactly the way we have just seen in Auckland.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 11:31 am
ben
It’s likely that a planned progression towards unifying call centres would overcome your second point. Separate call centres would currently have separate approaches to investing in replacement or new technology. Consistency in approach there could well lead to significant efficiences.
Regarding your first point, it sems a bit far-fetched. I haven’t seen any evidence that the PSA would be likely to take such an approach; which would be both high-risk and counter-productive.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Typical bleating socialist… who thinks jobs exist as a matter of right. News flash Ms Pilott – jobs exist to get a job done. If a job is done inefficiently it requires lots of people until the money runs out (c.f. Greece).
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 11:46 am
This is how my insurance company operates and it’s great to be able to talk to anyone who answers as they can bring all my info up on the screen.
Vote:I don’t have a lot of problems with privacy. Most of this stuff is so boring to anyone else that a few simple protections are generally usually enough.
June 13th, 2011 at 11:50 am
a complete shambles in the making
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 11:55 am
If, and it is a big if, the Government limits its activities to plain vanilla consolidation of portals into the Government, then this might deliver modest gains.
But they will have to be ruthless and demand that the efficiencies are delivered upfront. So, for example, if they are going to consolidate existing call centres, the rule should be that only 90% of the staff from each call centre will be transferred, thus delivering a 10% headcount reduction from day one. If they transfer 100% of the staff in the hope of delivering savings down the track, then experience suggests that the efficiency gains will be smaller and delivered later. Part of this is just human nature: the new call centre managers will be disinclined to make their staff redundant, partly because sacking people is hard, partly because reducing the size of your own empire is hard.
The danger is that some bright sparks in the State Services Commission or MED will convince the Government that they should be investing in leading-edge technology that will deliver world-beating efficiency gains. These bright-sparks must be resisted, since the world is littered with failed attempts by governments to invest in leading-edge technology that will deliver world-beating efficiency gains.
The problem is that politicians hate vanilla consolidations of existing activities because they are boring and don’t show how hip and hi tech and progressive the government is. Leading-edge technology that will deliver world-beating efficiency gains is a sure vote winner: and a sure money loser.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
mikenmild
It’s likely that a planned progression towards unifying call centres would overcome your second point
No, it’s not. The very same type of efficiencies were promoted in the Supercity. And they have either failed to materialised or been overwhelmed by other new costs, so that the Supercity is a net drain on ratepayers compared to the former status quo.
Large project after large project is abandoned by government departments. ACC is a repeat offender here in IT. There are substantial diseconomies in government (and the private sector, actually) because complexity is exponentially increasing in scope and size.
The first point is not only not conjecture, but is obvious. There is a reason why large assets like rail and bus services and airlines and health services are repeatedly subject to strike action, while PC servicing and dairies and petrol stations are not. It is because those large services are centralised and staffed by a relatively homogenous workforce with aligned interests. More centralisation, and the greater the investment in fixed assets, then the greater the exposure to industrial action.
If a single call centre is constructed, is it really that hard to imagine a single union will be able to convince the majority in there to sign up? This is vastly easier in a single place than if the service is fragmented and in many small locations. And, given that, will it really be that hard to imagine, the government having eliminated all the alternatives call centres, that the union will then use its tremendous new power to extract more concessions from the employer?
On what other basis could Pilott be keen on this idea? Some of her members are about to be made redundant.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 12:43 pm
I know what PSA had in mind. When the Kapiti area got long distance dialling in the early 1980′s, the Post Office announced it it was closing down the manual switchboard at Paraparaumu used for connecting toll calls. Margaret Shields (then Labour MP for the area) said that the phone operators should be redeployed to regularly phone up elderly and lonely people to see how they were. Little did she know what her OWN party was about to engage in Rogernomics which intended to do anything but this sort of thing.
The PSA proposal would be quite OK if it translated into more doctors, nurses, etc, but I doubt this is what the PSA has in mind.
There is a bit of a worry here. While the call centre could deal with simple enquiries, what would be the situation if the query was a bit more complicated. Would a caller with a curly tax query be told to see an accountant (I regard this as a ‘courthouse’ approach, it is not really geared to the public).
It is interesting that this shows how telecommunications has developed. Until about 20-30 years ago, NZ’s telecommunications network just could not handle advanced needs of business such as national call centres or even one phone answering point for an organisation spread across several sites in the same area. The Railways and former NZ Electricity Department operated their own national phone networks to meet their operational needs. Imagine for example a control centre making a toll call via an operator to tell a power station to start up a turbine.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Your call is important to us.
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Please continue to hold.
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Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
I shudder to think of the complexity of a system capable of handling the extraordinary nuances of the tax code as well as the welfare system as well as student loans as well as CYFS complaints, as well as everything else. In fact I don’t think it is possible to build a system capable of handling both the complexity of the current systems as well as manage changes to them as they regularly and frequently occur. What will happen, instead, is that there will be some combination of long hold times, bad advice given in calls (with exactly zero comeback available to long suffering citizens), and massive cost overruns as engineers struggle to hold together a system asked to do too many things.
Also, I predict the hold music will include endless amounts of Dave Dobbyn.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 1:05 pm
ben
Why is there no evidence of the PSA exploiting vulnerabilities in communications now, for example in IRD or WINZ?
The is a difference here from the supercity scenario – if call centres could be consolidated over time (unlike the rushed, likely botched Auckland merger) there is no reason to suppose efficiency gains could not be made. At the very least, a business case could be made.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
New Zealand: pioneers in taking ideas that have failed abysmally everywhere else and proving conclusively that they’ll fail here too.
How about we do the opposite to things that we know don’t work and annoy people? Promise that no NZ government department will have an automated system (other than outside of business hours) and offer a guarantee that every tax-paying citizen has the right to speak, without delay, to a public servant vested with sufficient authority, and imbued with enough expertise in their specialised field, to actually sort out their problem.
Isn’t that the bare minimum we should expect from any party worthy of having control of the machinery of government?
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Rex, you are of course perfectly correct.
One novel suggestion I have is that the Government start by simply reducing the number of things that it does, and only then should it start to improve the efficiency with which it does those (hopefully few) remaining things.
My worry is that National have fallen into the trap of trying to perfect socialism. They are applying time and resources to what will inevitably be a failed attempt to replace the market with government provided goods and services.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
mikenmild – I’ve just explained several reasons for why consolidation isn’t likely to work. I’ve also just explained why communications haven’t been previously targeted – their fragmentation protects them.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Rex – yes if only the bureaucracy could just be efficient, that would solve everything.
You are right, of course, it would be nice. But I rather think if it were possible for the bureacracy to be so organised it would have happened somewhere by now. Georgebolwing nails it – the problem is trying to perfect socialism. Nicely put, George.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
ben suggests:
There’s quite a few firms in the private sector affecting an arrogant attitude to their customers and offering appalling customer service. The difference is, they either go broke and are replaced by providers who are prepared to offer what we want, or rescued at the last minute by new management who simply insist things are done right, or employees are shown the door.
Why should the public service be any different? Primarily (answering my own rhetorical) because the bosses (politicians) wouldn’t know accountability and efficiency if it hit them in their fat lazy arses. The answer, therefore – get rid of the bosses, replace them with people who are accountable, and that accountability will flow down through the public service almost automatically.
(Which is not to dispute that government has far too many fingers in far too many pies. But even core functions can be accountable and efficient, or not. And saying “ah well, that’s government for ya, let’s just have less of it” is giving up too easy).
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Rex, again I agree, but without the discipline of a bottom line and competition, working out what is and is not being done well is nigh impossible. There is really nothing to compare the accountability that goes with a firm in competition attempting to convince customers to fork out their hard earned cash for your product over your competitor’s.
Not only do most government services face no competition, each customer they face usually adds to their cost line but not their revenue line, unlike private companies. So not only do officials lack the feedback necessary to work out where the problems are, it is not necessarily in their interests to fix the problem – since fewer customers calling eases pressure on their budget!
I got the idea for this difference in incentives from the guy who writes Coyote Blog. He runs private parks in the US in competition with state parks. He says the difference between what he does and what his state competitors do is this: each customer that pulls up to his park brings both revenue (and some additional cost). He needs those customers there to pay his bills, and so he does everything he can to attract them and keep them there. For state parks, each customer brings cost but no revenue. The fewer customers state parks attract, the easier time they have meeting their budgets. So, surprise surprise, state parks do not go out of their way to make customers feel welcome, amenities are comparatively undeveloped, maintenance is, apparently, way behind, and so on. This public/private distinction is fundamental and I suspect it is everywhere.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 4:32 pm
ben
Absolutely agree on the public/private context. In my experience, nothing runs so well as a small business directly managed by its owner. Many organisational problems are related to size – think of service from large banks or insurance companies. This difficulty is compounded in the public sector by the absence of normal commercial measures of success and the prevalence of politics.
For the public sector, there are no magic solutions to the problems of context. We can, however, expect sensible efficiencies where possible. For example, Rex’s desire to speak immediately to someone empowered to make a decision is, frankly, ludicrous. I think call centres have come some way in recent years, along with better use of websites. IRD would be one example of a government agencty that’s doing this stuff a lot better.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
It’s going to be a disaster. All that will happen is that “unofficial” call centres will come into operation at the agencies to back up the main call centre because the latter can’t possibly cover all the evolving knowledge of government. As soon as people get stuffed around a few times then they’ll start making physical appointments with the people who know stuff rather than phoning the mega call centre.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 8:41 pm
mikenmild opines:
Orly?
If the matter is a simple one, then why not empower the call centre operator to deal with it on the spot? In some cases the parameters could easily be set in dollar terms, in others it might be slightly more complex, but I’ve never understood the point of calling to speak to someone who can’t fix the problem.
If your soup is cold you send it back and the waiter is empowered to go into the kitchen and make sure you get another. Why is it “ludicrous” to expect that if I’m not happy with a government department and we’re talking some smallish figure – say, under $200 – the employee on the phone shouldn’t have the power to say “right, I’ve sorted that out for you”. If it’s over $200 it gets filtered up to someone on a higher grade who has decision making capacity up to, say, $1,000. And if no one wants to make the decision, I get put through to the boss… that’s what would happen in most businesses.
But that’s because, as ben says, most businesses give a damn. And that, in turn, is because their livelihoods depend on it, like the private parks guy.
Which is why I like the idea of contracting out public services to the private sector provided the performance indicators are set right and why, for instance, prisoners are queuing up to go to the private prison in WA while at the same time it runs at a lower cost per inmate and achieves better results than the state prisons. And when I call there, I’m always treated with respect, not thinly disguised contempt.
How about we peg a portion of each public servant’s pay to a set of KPIs? Good ones add to the salary, bad ones deduct from it. Suddenly you’d find decisions were getting made when you called, because they wouldn’t want you to lodge a complaint. Sure there are barriers to that (notably the unions) but that doesn’t make it ludicrous – wishful thinking, at worst, and then only because no politician has the balls to do it.
Vote:June 13th, 2011 at 8:44 pm
It’s just a step towards complete automation. Why have one call centre when you can just have one website? The intermediate phase before abolishing the call centre will be when the call centre staff are just using the same web interfaces as the public.
Vote: