AMSD – Legal and Regulatory Assessment
5. Empower the Customer
The chapter’s analysis highlights the follow points: 1
Very little choice is available to users of PEMDA services. The customer choice strategies are therefore not deployed easily, despite their power to improve services. Further, the instruments for forcing more choice into current systems are not obvious. Most regulations are low-level and concentrate on measuring service standards and capturing customer complaint, not taking action on the results of those measurements. Subsidiary legislation from recent laws will be important.
2
Exclusivity rules (explicit or implicit) in laws, regulations and PERDA should be discouraged. When preparing PERDA for each sector, rules that support factors for successfully creating competitive customer choice should be written into the new instrument for establishing the sector structure.
3
Service standards are a well recognized customer quality assurance tool under AMSD. The Indonesian SPM initiative (PP65/2005) taken by central government to establish (minimum) service standards appears to have different objectives than those when SPMs are used locally to assure service quality. Regulations should differentiate and make clear that SPMs used for deploying Strategy 4 should reflect community interest and take into account the factors that enable the improvement of short-route accountability of SDOs.
4
Even if SPMs are established which can be used locally, the SDO must commit to acting on them. Customer Service Agreements/Charters are a good method but there is no specific requirement for them in the current legal and regulatory framework. If they do not appear under the new Public Services law (25/2009), they could also be trialed in the pilot projects.
5
Three new laws (25/2009 on public services, 37/2008 on ombudsmen and 14/2008 on access to public information) provide a foundation for deploying this strategy, so the development of the regulatory framework under these laws should be a priority for action.
6
The basic competency required to deploy the customer strategy is good quality consultation with the community. But the key laws (10/2004 and 32/2004) and regulations do not make it mandatory nor stipulate processes that would provide good consultative outcomes. Again, if the centrally promulgated laws do not address the issue, the pilot project effort should.
Having achieved understanding of the community needs, the next challenge is actually being able to act on it. That is Strategy 5 (organization empowerment).
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