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The McKinsey Quarterly 

When Citizens are Your Customers 

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Published 8/31/2009 

Author: Sebastien Katch and Tim Morse 

Sebastien Katch is a consultant in McKinsey’s Chicago office, and Tim Morse is a principal in the New Jersey office.

Summary

 

Any public-sector agency that directly interacts with large numbers of citizens often finds that demand for its services overwhelms the limited resources available to provide them. A government can’t prioritize its citizen “customers” by using metrics like how valuable they are or how costly to serve—common practices in the private sector under similar circumstances. This was the problem facing a US federal agency seeking to make its call centers and paper-processing facilities more efficient. Rising budget pressure and demand for the agency’s services had had the effect of compromising them. In fact, during times of peak demand, agents answered less than three-quarters of phone calls to the agency, which also processed less than half of all paper applications within its target response time.

Optimizing the resources allocated to the two channels proved difficult.

© 2009 The McKinsey Quarterly 
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The McKinsey Quarterly

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