In this (long) blog post, I will focus on the public sector, which I also came in contact with in my last post. Below, I describe a positive and a negative personal experience I had with two public organizations. My negative experience comes from trying to receive a so called Spanish NIE number. The positive is from an ambulance ride in Sweden. I also relate the events to some of the concepts in my earlier posts, such as customer experience and value in-use.

Positive

As my positive experience, I want to mention one moment when I fell off my bike and had to go with ambulance to the hospital. I had to admit that I do not remember it all very clear, since I hit my head bad enough to barely being able to tell my name, but the woman who came with me in the ambulance and my dad who arrived shortly after both told me how impressed they were with the whole procedure.

So, I fell off my bike. Or I flew off, after my front wheel was hit by my friend as a joke, hit my head in the ground and remained still on the ground. A woman saw it all, who turned out to be my friend's mom, stopped her car and ran over. After not being able to reach me she called an ambulance, which was there only five minutes later. The ambulance crew did a quick check to see if I was ok enough to be lift, lifted me up in the car, had the woman come with and started getting me to consciousness again. Talking comforting to me and the woman all the way, doing their checks at the same time, arriving at the hospital and directly getting a doctor to come look at me, the whole procedure was extremely efficient and professional and the customer service was all you could ask for.

They talked to me like the child I was, trying to keep me calm and using words I understood but still informing me of what I had to know. They let my friend's mom come with in the ambulance as support and when my dad came he was escorted directly to my room. From the arrival of the ambulance to the moment I could leave the hospital, there was value in-use, value co-creation with me or the woman telling what had happened and how I felt, and a very high level of servitization could be noticed. Keeping it short and ending the story here, the customer experience and the service was incredible and had it not been for the unfortunate event of having to be in an accident, I would be glad to experience that level of service again.

Negative

During the first half of this year, I lived in Spain to work and to write my master thesis. When you want to work in Spain as a citizen from another European country, you need a special foreigner identification number. This is called Número de Identificación de Extranjero, or NIE as a short, and is issued by the public organization Administración General del Estado. This is what my negative experience is about.

If you search for “NIE Spain” on google, you get up recently asked questions such as “How do I get a NIE?” and “Where can I get a NIE fast?”. Also, a number of sites pop up with offers to get you your NIE fast and easy if you pay them. Quickly, you get the feeling that this NIE number is not something you fix in an afternoon. Rather, it seems to be quite a mess, which some people would even be prepared to pay money to avoid. And yes, this is what I experienced as well.

Getting a NIE number requires a lot of step. First, you need your work to fix a permit for you to go get it. Second, you need to book a first time to go present this permit along with many other documentations. This is where the mess starts. This time is impossible to get, especially if you live in such a crowded city as Barcelona, which was what I did. There are some tricks: 1. Log onto their (very old) web page at 8.00 am on Monday mornings and click like a madman on the booking times that just got released. Impossible, tried six weeks straight. 2. Go to the drop-in times at 10.00 in the mornings every Tuesday, Wednesday. Asked around, had to be there latest 5.00 in the morning to even get a drop-in ticket. Impossible, did not even try. 3. Go to another city and pretend that you live there and if they figure out you don’t, convince them they have to give it to you anyways, which they indeed do. I went with trick number 3.

Since my boyfriend is Spanish and fluent in the language, which I am not, I brought him. Thank God I did. They did not know (or pretended they did not) a word in English. Together, after being lucky that some Swedish people were just in front of me in line and managed to get their number just before me, my boyfriend and I convinced the zero-service minded staff to give me one too. Then, since in Spain, I had to pay in cash. At the local police office. And they had no change. Out to find a bank, take out money, go to a café to buy a coffee to get change, go back.

I think I can stop here. It was a mess and it required a lot of time, effort and frustrated moments where I almost thought of moving away from Spain again. The service level was zero and it did not seem like anyone even tried to do their job. Referring to the concepts discussed in earlier posts, the customer experience was not good, the value co-creation only existed in the moment the staff gave me my number and even though offering a service, the servitization of the business was just not there. However, something very clear was the value in-use. Because there was sure no value in the service until I got use for my number after finally having received it. In other words, the Administración General del Estado could learn a lot from the material in this course.

(For other frustrated posts like this one, just google NIE Spain again 😉)

#mssl70