Editor's Blog: Don't knock e-government until you've tried it

I've had some good experiences with e-government, with my local council, in recent months. And they're perhaps even better in my mind when I compare them to more routine interactions with those we pay to manage and provide our local services. (A definition lost on some public servants.)

It may not be the biggest issue facing society but graffiti is unsightly and leads to other crimes. So I took it upon myself to use the website of my local council, Merton, in south-west London, to report some local defacement.

I received a reference number almost immediately and didn't get my hopes up too high. Two days later and the graffiti was gone. I didn't receive any kind of 'ticket now closed' email or alert but I wasn't about to complain about that.

A couple of weeks later and my routine walk to the tube station was blighted by more rubbish scrawls on some street furniture. Banksy it was not.

So I chanced my arm again, this time expecting some kind of 'It's not near enough to you' auto-reply. Lo and behold, after another two or three days, that instance had also been wiped clean, hopefully making some acne-faced yoot cry into his pillow.

Compare these instances to times I have called my local council. These include me reporting a water leak on a neighbouring road that had run for over a week, while I'd been away...

"Is it in front of your house?"
"No, I just pass it by every day."
"So why are you calling us?"
"Because there must be thousands of litres of water going to waste and I thought I should let you know."
"But it's not in front of your house."

...and calling to complain about what I considered unfair charges after failing to pay a council tax payment on time. My point was that as someone who usually pays on time, if this were a bank with a credit card payment - to use a private sector analogy - the fee would probably be waived. To paraphrase the response, it was along the lines of: 'We don't have to, we're the government.'

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These experiences tie in with a column today from the analysts over at Quocirca. The point is that modern technology can allow different types of service for different citizens, depending on channel, past behaviour and future expectation. It's called CRM. Only I'm not sure my local authority is employing it, cutely turning that letter 'C' from 'customer' to 'citizen'. (Please don't write in to tell me we're subjects in the UK rather than citizens - allow me that licence!)

As I said at the beginning of this blog, when I use services wholly online the experience is better. The cynic in me says this could be to do with targets - for example making sure a certain proportion of interaction with citizens takes place online.

Or it could just be that human-to-human interaction is second-best to working through a website for this type of thing. In which case, hats off to the team at Merton who in recent months upgraded that site. I'm tempted to refer to them as the IT guys, who definitely had something to do with my good experiences and almost certainly didn't have much to do with my poor experiences.

Have you had similar experiences? Can you explain why I should have received different levels of service? Drop me an email or post a Reader Comment below.