The Wiki Man | 5 April 2008

One distinction between the private and the public sector is that the former generally has an incentive to offer customers a variety of levels of service, while the latter doesn’t. That’s why you can get a pizza delivered to your home when you’re feeling fine, but you can’t get a doctor to visit you when you’re ill. (It’s a wonder suspicions weren’t aroused about Dr Harold Shipman ten years earlier when it seems he was the only GP in the country still to make house calls.)

Little by little, though, organisations have found that allowing people to choose their level of service need not raise costs, and often reduces them. Just as, oddly, people seem happy to pay restaurants the same price for a takeaway as for a formal meal — when offered the choice of two levels of service customers quite often prefer the simpler one. Given the choice between a cash-machine and a human teller, most choose impersonal service.