Compliers, Not Customers

This article, you may have noticed, uses the word "compliers," not "customers." The distinction is important. In most compliance organizations, the customers are not the people the organization deals with every day.

The customers of a public function are best defined as its principal intended beneficiaries-those individuals or groups the work is primarily designed to benefit. In functions whose principal product is compliance, not service-such as police departments, environmental protection agencies and tax-collection agencies-the primary customer is usually the community at large. People the agency deals with day after day, such as suspected criminals, polluters and taxpayers, are not its primary customers. They are important, but they are not the agency's reason for being.

Many people in the reinventing government movement call these people customers, because they want compliance agencies to treat them better. For example, President Clinton's 1993 executive order, "Setting Customer Service Standards," said, "For the purposes of this order, 'customer' shall mean an individual or entity who is directly served by a department or agency."

The problem with this definition is that it tells the police and prison wardens that criminals are their customers; it tells environmental agencies that the businesses they regulate are their customers; and it tells the IRS that taxpayers are its customers. Most of the time, compliance organizations can improve their performance by treating compliers more like customers, because that increases voluntary compliance. But it is dangerous to confuse compliers and customers. Obviously the safety of the public should be more important to environmental protection agencies than the satisfaction of business executives. And consider what would happen if the IRS really made the satisfaction of taxpayers its highest objective. Tax revenues would plummet.

The employees of compliance agencies know that polluters and taxpayers are not their customers. They know that pleasing these people could even compromise their mission. (They could please polluting businesses but ruin the environment, for example.) As a result, they quit listening the minute some outside expert starts talking about "customers" and "customer service."

Candace Kane, who spent five years running the National Partnership for Reinventing Government's customer service operation, says she learned this lesson the hard way with agencies like EPA, OSHA and the Food and Drug Administration. "I couldn't even get an intellectual discussion when I used the word 'customer,' " she says. Finally she got through by talking about improving voluntary compliance by delivering quality service.