Should the public sector have customers?

I ran a programme with the senior leadership team at Christchurch City Council about five years ago. One thing I noticed about how GMs communicated was the deliberate use of the word "citizens" as opposed to customers.

I like this. It's something I think about in my book on public sector strategy, which talks a bit about the lasting impact of public sector reforms during the late 1980s. Referring to citizens as 'customers' is just one of the ways commercial thinking and language are used in public agencies.

In many ways, treating and thinking about citizens as customers is a strong positive. The idea is that we aim for more satisfying transactions and interactions with the government. There is a popular school of thought that expectations of service providers are rising, thanks to the fast, slick and intuitive interactions offered by large public companies. According to some commentators, the government should aim to match those expectations, delivering a service of similar quality and convenience to industries like banking and shopping.

I get that – and I want that! Anyone who's been stuck in a bureaucratic process wants that.

I can't shake the idea that considering citizens as customers is a bit of a demotion. One thing I particularly like about the connotation of the word citizen is the idea of a person who participates in a society or system of government – while a customer feels more passive, the agent or subject of a transaction.

“As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.”- Adlai E Stevenson

Even where simple transactions are concerned, the public sector does not have "customers" in the truest sense. If public services were commercially viable, they would face market competition, and citizens would have a choice about whether to purchase them! However, in the public sector, in the "hostage model," you've often got two options: take it or take it.

Why does this matter?

It matters for many noble reasons – shaping our democracy, promoting civic engagement…

But more tangibly and from my perspective, this distinction matters because when deciding how to spend limited public resources, we may need to choose between customer-centric or citizen-centric.

Businesses are motivated by profit and always focus on customers' needs. However, in public organisations focused on the big picture, the interests of the broader citizenry may trump an individual's or customer's desires. The two are not mutually exclusive, but there are often occasions where they conflict. Recent ones I've observed include:

• A choice between delivering more effective services by focusing on internal process improvements or delivering more satisfactory services by improving a customer transaction interface.

• It decides whether to design services that attract more fee-paying customers or best serve unmet community needs in facilities such as libraries, swimming pools and community centres.

My gut feeling on this one is that when in doubt, the citizens' needs must come first. The customer should be considered a subset of the more worldly 'citizen'. Citizens might be customers in a transactional capacity – ordering a passport or paying for dog registration – but that subset should not define our broader relationship with our public agencies or become more important than the big-picture collective interest.

What do you think?

Is this a choice you've been faced with in your organisation?

Do you talk about citizens or customers?

Does it matter?