Towards Service Excellence: The Responsiveness of Government Agencies to their Clients

Excellent service is about being responsive to the needs of clients.

We carried out a special audit of five services provided by government departments to establish whether their systems and processes were responsive to their clients. For the purposes of this report we refer to the service providers we audited as the “five agencies”.

Government departments are required to report to Parliament on their service performance in delivering agreed goods and services. In general, client service issues have received little attention at a government-wide level.

Our objectives in carrying out the audit were to:

• identify principles of good client service practice;
• give more prominence to client service as an aspect of management;
• stimulate debate on the subject; and
• encourage the sharing of experiences.

Overall, we were impressed with the efforts that each of the five agencies had taken to be responsive to its clients. We found examples of excellent service in all five agencies. Nevertheless, we identified some areas for improvement.

The full text of this report is available in PDF format (470kB).