Gathering Customer Requirements of Public Sector Services Using Questionless Questionnaires : Automating Policy Making and Leadership in Customer-Driven Democracies

Best Practice Tool for Gathering of Customer Requirements -- This article presents the leading method in private sector organizations for determining customer requirements -- questionless questionnaires -- and application of that method to public sector organizations: welfare and other government services, political election campaigns, government agency policy making, and the like. Tool Components -- The components of questionless questionnaires and a best-practice process for applying them are presented. Public sector challenges (globalization, population aging, urbanization, knowledge economy emergence, environmentization, and the internet) handled well by customer requirements gathering and new opportunities generated by it are examined. Customer Requirements Change What Leadership Is -- The nature of leadership changed when the private sector used this method; public sector effects are likely to be starker and more important. This is a qualitative study of such effects, generating hypotheses on how customer requirements gathering changes power, leadership, policy making, service effectiveness, and employee satisfaction. Recursive Tool Application -- Preliminary data are presented on: why public sector institutions resist applying methods developed in the private sector, what customers of the data produced by gathering customer requirements require of such data (the customer requirements of “customer requirements data”), what dimensions of any product or service determine customer satisfaction with it, and comparison of a particular customer requirements gathering method -- the questionless questionnaire -- with usual survey questionnaires. Application Examples -- Examples of successful private and public sector use of questionless questionnaires are presented. The role of methods other than questionless questionnaires for gathering customer requirements is described as well