Public Sector must try harder to please consumer
Public services have been having a bad time recently, with data disks going missing, concerns about MRSA in hospitals and intense dissatisfaction with the move to fortnightly bin collections by many local authorities.
It’s hardly surprising then that only one in five people in the UK believe public services are generally well run. Most of us believe that we get a pretty poor deal from the public sector, and this is reflected in very low Buzz scores for public services, according to a new BrandIndex-style public opinion tracker from YouGov.
The Home Office in particular comes in for a lot of stick with a Buzz score for the month of June of –38. This is closely followed by the Ministry of Defence (-26) and the UK Border Agency (-24).
It is sobering to note that the London 2012’s Olympic Delivery Agency (the public body responsible for building the venues and putting the infrastructure in place) scores a disappointing –18.
Not All Bad
But it’s not all grim news. Fire and ambulance services, for example, are well regarded. In fact some public sector brands out-perform the private sector in their buzz scores – though it isn’t saying much that HMRC, the department that lost disks contain the records of 24m people, has a better buzz than Northern Rock and British Airways after the Terminal 5 fiasco.
Buzz is a measure of how brands are perceived day by day, but people are not usually in contact with most public services most of the time. Is there a gap between how actual users perceive them compared with the wider public? The DVLA and hospitals perform well with high satisfaction ratings from service users. However, agencies such as the Job Centre, local authorities and NHS Direct have a lot of catching up to do.
Stephan Shakespeare is co-founder of YouGov.
