مشتری مداری در دولت الکترونیک: انگیزه ها و اثرات

Electronic government is attested to have the potential to shape public administrations to be more customer oriented. In order to be customer oriented, municipalities need knowledge about customer needs. Which municipalities explore customer needs and what do they change is investigated using data of a nationwide survey about e-government in Switzerland. Results show big differences in exploring customer needs between municipalities. General characteristics of municipalities and support of administrative leaders and politicians can partly explain these differences. Customer orientation shows effects on the availability of usability features on Web sites and on the selection of topics, to which municipalities provide forms or transactions online.

Intensified customer orientation is one of the principal claims of a modern public management. At the end of the century, customer orientation has become a burgeoning theme in public management (Flynn, 1997, Wagenheim & Reurink, 1991, Swiss, 1992 and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1987). An elementary precondition for an organization to act customer oriented is to have knowledge about customer needs, or in terms of the private sector, to have “market sensing capability” (Day, 1994). In general, electronic government (e-government) means the use of new technologies in the public sector, especially to exchange information with external parties (Schmidt, 2003). The hope to make public administration more customer oriented often accompanies the introduction of new technologies. Customer orientation is a main issue in e-government (Ho, 2002). It is essential to know customer needs to be able to be customer oriented. However, the gathering of information about customer needs is not easy and requires resources. In Switzerland, only 10 percent of local governments perform regularly, at least every four years, customer surveys (Schedler & Summermatter, 2005). This paper will examine two questions. (1) Which municipalities invest in customer orientation and therefore use customer surveys or other methods to explore customer needs? (2) Is there a difference in the proposition of electronic public services between municipalities investing in customer orientation and those not doing so?