Where are your customers?

There are a number of reasons for knowing where your customers are:

• To target limited resources to the areas where there are the greatest number of customer or where customers have the greatest need
• To target information to the areas where there are the greatest number of customer or where customers have the greatest need
• To identify areas where there are significant numbers of potential customers but low take up
• To identify areas where there is high take up to find out why
• To build up a clearer picture of particular communities

This last point – Community Mapping - is important if you want to serve geographic communities effectively as well as communities of interest such as customer groups. Building up a picture of the levels of current and potential service us in each of your communities will enable you to divide up your resources to match that pattern of need. It will also enable you to think about how you deliver the range of services a community needs across departmental and organisational boundaries via one stop shops, localisation, use of intermediaries as gateways etc.

An example of how communities can be mapped using data is at http://www.norfolkdata.net/) or they can also be mapped on the internet in a dynamic way such as http://www.diss.norfolkhomepage.org.uk.

The size of community depends on the service and your own ways of organising services. If the areas are large it is useful to show how they are built up from smaller units based on the smallest level at which your customer information is held. This will enable you to (a) standardise across the range of customer profiling work you do and (b) slice and dice information more easily. For example you may initially want to know how childcare is accessed according to your social services areas, but you may later want to know how they are being accessed in a particular town or compare levels of childcare access in an area with the use of bus services in that area which people could use to get to the childcare.

An example of community mapping can be seen on the Norfolk Insight data observatory (http://www.norfolkdata.net/) . A series of different geographies based on the different ways in which local councils deliver services and standard building g blocks such as council electoral divisions or census Output Areas are used to slice up data including customer profiles. This then means you can automatically generate a picture of each area when you are deciding how to provide services there.

You do not have to have a complex GIS system to do this – agreeing what the building block areas are and consistently collecting or analysing information on the basis of those areas will give you a pen portrait of each place.

Where are your services?

To carry out effective improvements in the way you serve the needs of customers and communities you need to know what you are delivering currently. The customer records you have will provide you with the volume of services you are delivering to current customers and to areas of your administration. You should know the total value of the service (remember to add a share of overhead costs such as management, building costs, ICT etc) so can use a simple division by the number of customers to work out the unit cost.

If you know the numbers who access the services via different channels you can do more sophisticated analysis according to cost per channel. Esd toolkit has developed a standard way of assigning unit costs to transactions through different channels. Alternatively there are general average costs which have been worked out where the ration is: web = 1; phone = 4; face to face and post = 12.

If you have an area based structure it will be valuable to use the same approach to work out the different costs per customer for each office as it will help you deciding whether you need to switch resources between offices. If possible try and use the same building blocks you are collecting information about customers on so you can compare the community and the services you deliver.

A general guide to service mapping and design is at http://www.innovationintopractice.org.uk/

Map Services against needs

Now you have details of the volumes of customers in each area and the unit cost, you can map how much you spend in each part of your area. You also have the profile of the type of people who are most likely to need or want the service. You can now look at where people who have that profile are in the area which will show you the potential demand for the service.

For example you may know that on average, 30% of people over 65 use a particular service such as a free bus pass. Your population data shows you the areas where they live. Your customer data shows you where they are using the service. It is likely there will be some areas where more than 30% are using it and some areas where less than 30% are – what we call hot spots and not spots.

It is valuable to talk to staff to find out why there are the differences – is it marketed better in one area than another? Are there people or organisations like community groups who are promoting it in one area by word of mouth? Are there other differences in the people in one area to another (perhaps they travel in to a town which has a service centre more often in one area to shop or do business)? This will help you design your marketing campaign.

It will also enable you to identify potential demand/need. The highest level of access of the group could be the level all of the group will need or want if you market effectively in the areas where take up is low. This will help plan the total resources needed for the service and how much you need in each area. It will also tell you where you need to market to increase demand.

It is also valuable to understand customer satisfaction and  http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/public_service_reform/innovation/satisfaction.aspx is a useful guide to this.