Ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls, why politicians should focus on feedback
Market research and customer satisfaction surveys are two sides of the same coin — you ask them what they want and then check if they are happy with what you gave them. About market research, however, Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. Henry Ford is also reputed to have said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’.”
Satisfaction surveys
But customer satisfaction is another matter altogether. Almost any brand worth its salt has an elaborate customer satisfaction measurement process. Customer satisfaction survey is arguably the most important activity in virtually every large or small corporation selling product or service — the scores being reported to the very top regularly. Tomes of management research exist on the subject and the field has its own set of TLAs (three letter acronyms) like CSI and NPS.
The government is an exception. If you are too scared to ask your customers their feedback, then you are probably certain it will bring bad news. This is probably why most governments do not dare do it and continue to remain ensconced in their cozy echo chambers! Of course, most governments around the world do not really see themselves as service providers or citizens as consumers. Not yet, at any rate. Lip service is as far as most get during election promise time.
If they did, phrases like anti-incumbency would not be bandied about so nonchalantly in prime-time TV debates. While there is sufficient interest among researchers to study citizen satisfaction, not many governments (besides a few local city governments in Canada and the US) have actually put this to practice. That is why Chhattisgarh government’s initiative, Jan Samvaad, to do exactly that, has broken new ground. Several state governments have a helpline number for citizens to call in and register complaints. But lack of faith in call centres is sufficient to discourage the majority from calling.
Most governments rely on the feedback from government machinery which obviously suffers from the Rashomon Effect. And we have seen non-scalable models in Amar Chitra Katha about kings walking the streets in disguise to gauge the happiness of subjects. When technology is used and the law of large numbers kicks in, biases just melt away.
Power of big data
Jan Samvaad is a proactive mechanism to seek citizens’ feedback on services delivered under various state and central schemes. A team of 250 outbound callers speaks with citizens. A structured questionnaire is used as a basis for guiding the conversation through several aspects of service delivery quality for eight key schemes to draw genuine and candid feedback. And this is done not by government employees but by an independent third party so citizens can talk without fear or bias.
Technological advances in computing power and fast plummeting costs of data collection and storage have well-nigh obviated the need for sampling. Big data has sounded the death knell for the law of small numbers. The government now knows not just whether there are isolated area-specific challenges in service delivery so those can be ironed out, but also if there are specific process components that need modification. It knows whether getting the service takes too long in certain Gram Panchayats or Blocks or even whether the citizens do not see much value in some scheme or initiative.
Amazing practical suggestions and polychromatic feedback have been received — some reinforcing the existing perceptions but many also shattering beliefs and turning upside down notions which were held as gospel. Most have been incorporated into improving the schemes.
Citizen-first strategy
With more than 100 crore mobile phone subscribers in India already, of which 48 crore have access to mobile Internet (nearly 30 crore of those are rural), what is already possible through calls and government mobile apps is massive. And it costs next to nothing compared to the cost of media carpet bombing for publicity. The confluence of technologies has set up a historic opportunity for governments to understand and seek feedback from citizens at an individual level. However, even though communication technology and big data are necessary, they alone are not sufficient.
Other essential ingredients include citizen-first strategy, data-driven culture, the desire to know the outside-in view, the courage to accept the feedback and an innate drive to improve coupled with visionary leadership. Will more of our leaders show the will?
(Courtesy of Mail Today)