Abstract
This paper calls for Australian police services to articulate a strategic declaration or vision of how they would operate (and be viewed by customers) in a genuinely customer-focused environment. Despite claims to be ‘customer focused’, Australian police services have conceptualised customers as a unity rather than an amalgam of discrete groups. Furthermore, police services have not specified the desirable elements of a customer-focused organisation beyond modest corporate statements, nor formulated rigorous indicators of success along the road to achieving customer service excellence. Against the backdrop of a philosophical discussion about the reinvention of communities as customers in corporate planning strategies, some of the broad-level business planning techniques that Australian police services should apply, it is argued, before claiming to be truly ‘customer focused’ are identified. These new planning tools — defining customer segments, competitive positioning and ‘blue-sky’ planning — are introduced as useful techniques to move police organisations from their current position to a desired future position as customer-centred organisations.
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