Why do most people prefer to be a public sector employee?... and Why do most people prefer to be a private sector customer?

The worst thing about our problems is that they are not of other people's business.

Mario Quintana

When I started this blog I make the promise to myself to write something every day .... mainly because I need to improve my writing English.

This blog is also a way to try to understand how, why and where some written words reach other people, with the Google help of course.

I have been around five days without to write, mainly because I wanted to say something about the Public Sector,... and at the same time to try to be neutral in my comments and sometimes be neutral is easy to say but difficult to keep.

I don´t know in North America, but in most of the Europe when you talk is very usual to find people that would like to be employee of the public sector and at the same time they prefer to receive services from private companies.

There are some "buzz" that try to put in relationship " poor quality service" with "public sector service",... and even now, I don´t want to be included in "that group", because at the end I believe that the main problem that they need to improve is the "quality control" in every process of the Public Sector System. If we don´t know what it needed, We will not be able to improve anything.

I said the main problem is the quality control because most of the times the people are satisfied with the received services level.

The problem is when someone don´t agree about something related with the received service (health care system, educational system etc), when this happened all system seems that need to be protected from the customer, even before to know why is complaining.

I have been talking about this issue with some Public Sector employees and the answer is that they have in every place a " customer care department" or even a "customer defender department", but I am not able to explain them that they are not going to collect valid data if like sometimes happened the person that will answer the customer question is the person that the customer complain about or if the person in charge of the customer service try to convince about the useless of the complain. It may be one of the reasons that the statistical perception quality improve at the same time that the "poor quality buzz grow".

In private companies, (not in oligopoly), the first level of the customer care service is to know the customer complain, listen the customer and transmit that they are going to take care and to try to solve the problem.

The private companies don´t use..

... to put "the employee ego" in front of the customer.

... to try to defend the work partner even if he is in a mistake.

The private companies try to learn from the mistakes, and the customer care department is a good place to know the perceived quality from the customer. The company CEO like to work with a bad perceived quality stats from the customer´s point of view instead a good perceived quality stats from the company staff.

The Private companies knows that in a competitive market, the "reputation" is most of the time the biggest asset from a company, and the reputation is builds in two ways:

• Providing a very good service most of the times..


• Recognizing and solving the problems that some times happened to the customers.
  

I´m sure that there are more reasons that produce that the global perceived quality of the public Sector Services is poor and expensive, and at the same time that this "buzz" grow more people will request why the Public Sector Services are not managed by Privates companies.

Of course there are a lot privates companies that use to manage the complains in the same way, but at the end the customer is able to choose to receive the service from another.