Customer insight needs to be on the agenda of local government. This is what speakers and attendees of the Customer Insight Conference said in Cambridge past week. About 100 local government officials attended the conference in the Moller Centre in Cambridge. The conference was organised by Smart Cities and Norfolk County Council.

Author Tim Anderson presented the Customer Insight Guide, a method to start doing customer research and service reengineering in local government. Mike Thacker of Porism-ESD presented the EU service list and showed how knowledge on services and profiles could lead to better targetting. This has been demonstrated by cases from the Central Bedfordshire and Luton Councils by Paul Barton.

"You need to embed customer insight into existing business processes, not have it as a stand alone piece of work" is just one of the many tweets out of the conference. During the conference, attendees commented on the various speakers and the message of the conference.

In the workshops, people could talk with customer insight practitioners, and these insights were brought together in a lively debate led by Chair Filip Meuris of Intercommunale Leiedal. "The days of experiment in local government are long gone, you need to know what you want to achieve" said Tim Anderson. This conference was the kick off for some hard work on customer insight.

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40smart_cities%20%23insight
- Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smartcities/sets/72157625210723190/
- EU service list: http://doc.esd-toolkit.eu/ServiceList/3.11.html
- Customer Insight Guide: http://www.smartcities.info/customer-profiling