To illustrate how customer satisfaction can be achieved, the Service Quality Wing (SQW) reproduces the accompanying article with permission from "Jane's Information Group - Jane's Police Review". The article highlights the simple act of making a telephone call as a customer, emphasising the totally different outcomes in terms of customer satisfaction.

"This routine and relatively simple act should not really pose any major problems for an organisation, however in this example it is obvious that the service provided by the police was woefully inadequate when compared to the company supplying the fridge. This example is thought provoking and has merit and as such should be considered in our attempts to improve the service provided by our organisation.

"The difference between the two organisations is that one services a market and the other markets a service. However in the end, the lesson to be learned is that more often than not customer satisfaction is not merely about addressing a customer's needs, but in fact is more about the manner in which they are dealt with whilst interacting with an organisation," Mr Wong commented.

Waking up to customer service

A few weeks ago, I ordered a new fridge from a company via the Internet. It was a firm that I had never heard of before, but it offered the cheapest deal when I carried out a web search for the product. I received a reassuring and courteous e-mail to acknowledge the order.

A few days later, I received an e-mail with a delivery date. I was thanked for my patience. On the eve of the delivery day, I rang the courier's telephone number, which had been provided, to try to establish a time of delivery. The freephone number went to the head office in Coventry.

The operator who answered my call asked me to hold while she rang my local depot. She rang the depot herself and did not just offer to give me the number. Thirty seconds later, she told me that I was "drop 56", which meant that I would probably receive the delivery between 3 pm and 3.30 pm the following day.

At exactly 3 pm that day, the courier rang me from his cab to tell me that he was close by. Then, the day after I had received the fridge, I received an e-mail asking whether I was satisfied with my purchase.

Now compare this experience with some of the horror stories that accompanied the recent HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report, First Contact, a thematic review of the way the police service handles calls from the public.

The newspapers were awash with anecdotes of 999 callers not receiving any response to their calls for days and how some telephone calls were not answered at all.

If a supplier of fridges at the price-sensitive end of the market can leave me with such a positive impression of its service, why does the police service, a so-called caring organisation, so often disappoint its customers?

Can't get no satisfaction

So, even the people we speak to on the phone and despatch a resource to can end up being disappointed that we did not keep in touch to let them know the progress or result of their call. The HMIC report, published last week, was, for me, a source of shame, because the first survey of service users that I was involved with - in 1992 - revealed that keeping in touch, or failing to do so, was the number one determinant of customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction was not about the time taken by officers to attend the scene, nor even the successful resolution of the incident, it was the ongoing dialogue that really mattered. If we have known about that for at least 13 years, why have we not done much about it?

I believe there are three fundamental reasons why the police service has failed to keep up with, for example, the fridge supplier in terms of customer service.

First, we do not see the telephone call as part of our service. I believe we regard it, at best, as a trigger for police action. At worst, I think we view the call as an event to be managed away.

I was appalled when I visited a force some years ago and found that "helpdesks" had been introduced. In my view, these desks were really a device for avoiding a police response. The key performance indicator of these units was the proportion of calls that warranted no further action. The helpdesk appeared only to be helping officers, rather than the public we serve.

I believe that until we start to measure the satisfaction of our customers at each point of the service delivery chain, and this data causes us to change our processes, we will continue to view the telephone call as an encumbrance.

The second thing we fail to do, as demonstrated by the helpdesk example, is put service quality at the heart of what we do. Most of our call-handling strategies over the last 10 years have been driven by increasing our efficiency. Centralised control rooms, graded call procedures and command and control systems have all been put in place to help us cope. There are few examples where the organisation's redesign in this area has been focused on improving our service to individual callers.

"Why does the police service, a so-called caring organisation, so often disappoint its customers?"

The service's third failing is its slowness to exploit technology. Most people in the UK have access to a mobile telephone and are, therefore, able to receive text messages immediately. Setting up a number of template messages would enable us to provide a continuity of service rather than the silence that normally follows a report to the police. E-mail offers further possibilities, yet I am not aware of any force that, as a matter of policy, asks for the e-mail details of customers or uses them to follow up on the results of incidents.

The police service is adept at helping victims, resolving incidents and processing prisoners. But it has been slow to wake up to the fact that in this multi-channel world of communication, many of its customers do not fit any of these traditional categories. There are, for example, people who report things to us, or ring us with information.

They are people, like my mum, who rang her local police station one Easter Sunday to report drug dealing outside her sheltered accommodation. She was told: "The drug squad do not work bank holidays. I will leave a message for them."

My mum is still waiting to hear what became of her call and, until she does, she is unlikely to call us again.

Mr Norman Bettison, Chief Executive of Central Police Training and Development Authority

The article reproduced by SQW