Evaluation of Customer Centre and e-Services in a Swedish Municipality with Focus on the Citizens' Perspective

Communication and quality of service to the citizens are considered to be of utmost importance in today's society. Even though the Swedish municipalities have a high level of self-regulation and freedom to organize communication and dialogue with their citizens in their own way, the Swedish government has expressed their demands of increased expectations by citing the potential of e-governance and high quality of service in order to increase the efficiency of the service to the citizens. To implement customer centers is one way to meet these demands. This paper offers a critical evaluation of consequences for Swedish citizens regarding the quality of service from the citizens' perspective in a municipality where a new customer centre and more e-services have been developed and established. The main research method is qualitative based upon analysis from twelve interviews with different personnel categories of employees within the municipality. The results are also based on analysis of customer investigations made by the municipality. No interviews are made directly with citizens. The key results are that this implementation and developing of e-services are mostly positive for the quality of service to the citizens due to e.g. that the accessibility to the municipal services has increased which has led to improved possibilities to choose the communication way of service for the citizens. Another positive results are the developing of the working processes that are moved to the customer centers, that the citizens needs have been highlighted and that the municipality use results of customer investigations and results of discussing with focus groups including citizens in the developing of e-services to improve the service and that there is a striving towards more democracy as all citizens will have an equivalent treatment with just one telephone number to the customer centre. But there are also some weak aspects found; e.g. that there can appear a lack of trust from the citizens to the system as all contacts are to be done through the customer centre and that there can be a lack of direct communication with clerks at the administration that have authority to make decisions. Also, there are citizens having problem using the tone selection when calling to the customer centre.