Events & News

Citizen Service Times

February, 2007

A newsletter dedicated to success stories in citizen service from around the federal government.

Please enjoy this issue of the Citizen Service Times. This newsletter is dedicated to success stories in citizen service from around the federal government. The featured topic for Volume 2, Issue 1 is Customer Satisfaction.

International Trade Administration Launches Customer Satisfaction Survey

By Susan Lusi, Director, Trade Information Center, U.S. Commercial Service, Department of Commerce Susan_Lusi@ita.doc.gov

The Trade Information Center (TIC) in the Department of Commerce recently implemented an automated telephone survey as a way to hear client feedback. Upon completing a counseling call, trade specialists invite callers to take a thirty-second satisfaction survey. If they agree to participate, the technology requires trade specialists to transfer callers to the survey. The survey consists of three questions measured by Likert scale, and an opportunity to leave comments, similar to a voice mail message. Since the survey was implemented, 1028 callers have participated in the automated survey. That is 8 percent of all callers during the period of August 14, 2006 and January 31, 2007.

The results have been encouraging. Ninety-five percent of callers were highly satisfied with their experience, and the same percentage gave top marks to the trade specialist. Ninety-nine percent of callers said they would recommend TIC services to others. Ten percent of those who took the survey chose to leave a voice message. Receiving direct and immediate feedback from clients is extremely gratifying to staff and a very effective way to learn about client needs. The automated survey allows for targeted feedback because the questions asked may be changed nearly as easily as changing a voice mail message. The TIC plans to vary the questions from time to time and perhaps ask for feedback on specific services.

The TIC is a resource for U.S. companies interested in exporting their products and services to international markets. Every day, international trade specialists hear the needs and concerns of U.S. exporters who call 1 800-USA-TRAD(E). Trade specialists advise callers on taxes and duties, trade regulations and requirements, free trade agreements, market information, and other issues that can contribute to a company’s success in international markets.

The TIC was established in 1992 as a central information center serving all members of the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee (TPCC), a group of nineteen federal agencies with programs that support international trade for U.S. companies.

Putting the “Customer” Back into Customer Satisfaction

By Steve Tae

Many organizations tout the importance of customer satisfaction, but how many go the extra mile and exceed customer expectations? What does putting the customer back into customer satisfaction mean? Far too often, customer satisfaction is measured as a number, a statistic, or an abstract goal. Any rating above 85 percent is good, any rating below 65 percent is bad, and everything in between suggests the status quo is good enough.

In reality, though, customer satisfaction is a proxy for how well an organization executes against its mission and for the value it provides to constituents. Unfortunately, many of the metrics tracked today do not provide a complete picture of how well an organization is doing. Therefore, many organizations have an incomplete picture of how well they are meeting customer needs and expectations.

There are two potential reasons for this incomplete picture: unfunded mandates and incomplete data.

Unfunded Mandates — Customer service is the great unfunded mandate. Organizations must provide customer service, but it is not always funded appropriately, if at all. Customer satisfaction rates are usually derived from responses to poorly designed surveys, which are quickly assembled to keep costs down. High-level quantitative measures, such as contact resolution and average speed of answer, often supplant qualitative measurements. Although quantitative measures are easier and cheaper to acquire, they do little on their own to gauge customer satisfaction. Accordingly, organizations do not receive customer feedback unless a significant problem exists. The lack of resources inhibits any investments from being made until a catastrophic event occurs.

Incomplete Data — New call center technologies allow organizations to capture data that does not necessarily provide insight into how they can improve the customer experience. Our customers contact us with a specific purpose—they want information, have to file a claim, or need to resolve an issue. If customer service representatives (CSRs) do not have the ability to answer a caller's question or solve the problem, customer satisfaction cannot be achieved even if calls are answered in fewer than two rings. Understanding customer pain points allows organizations to prioritize investments that meet mission objectives effectively, deliver better customer service, and be more effective at meeting mission objectives.

To better understand customer satisfaction, some organizations are reevaluating how they measure customer satisfaction and are attempting to involve customers more. These organizations are taking deliberate steps to decipher their interactions with customers to discover what is really important. They are beginning to measure other factors, such as customer task completion rates, employee knowledge, customer channel preference, customer channel usage and self-service effectiveness.

How can organizations do this? First, they need to understand how subjective measures affect downstream outcomes. Contact centers need to qualify how each measurement links to other balancing measures. Such measures include quality assurance, CSRs’ subject knowledge, employee satisfaction and the ability to completely address customer requests.

Let’s take one example: employee satisfaction rates. Raising employee satisfaction rates can translate to an improved customer experience and lower operating costs. If employees like what they do, and receive the appropriate tools and training from their employers, they will likely do a better job of listening to customers' needs. These factors are sometimes more important than how efficiently we answer the phone or respond to e-mails. These subjective metrics measure the quality of the service provided.

Second, organizations need to find a way to link customer satisfaction metrics to their mission—not just to internal process efficiencies. Organizations must answer the question, “How does my customer service operation support the mission of the agency?” Reengineering what each metric means and how each metric maps to an organization’s overall vision helps organizations prioritize measures and, therefore, investments.

Finally, organizations need to talk to their customers and monitor the customer experience across all communication channels to ensure they are doing what their customers want. To do so, they can collect detailed data within each channel (phone, web, e-mail, paper mail or face-to-face) from customers about aspects of the customer service experience that are satisfactory and those that are not. That data can provide organizations with detailed insights they can then use to change policies, procedures, and processes to improve the customer experience. Only then can organizations begin to exceed customer expectations.

A recently published report, Citizen-Centered eGovernment Needs Performance Measures for Success, evaluated how the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) scored agencies against the President’s Management Agenda. It stated that for better or worse, performance measures drive the direction of an organization’s efforts. The article suggests that agencies need to obtain customer input about what is working and what is not working. The study underscores the point that the key to success is to focus on the correct measures. Organizations that want to improve the customer experience need to identify the mission-critical measures that define success from the customer’s perspective. Only when this happens will the customer once again be the focus in customer satisfaction.

Federal Consulting Group Sponsors End-of-Year Meeting for ACSI Users

By Patricia B. Wood, Director of Communications, Federal Consulting Group, Department of the Treasury, patricia.wood@bpd.treas.gov

Karen Evans, Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget, gave an E-Government update at a meeting sponsored by Treasury’s Federal Consulting Group on December 15, 2006. She used the occasion to announce that customer satisfaction would be among OMB’s three metrics for e-government initiatives. “We want measures that show results,” she said.

The National Institutes of Health received FCG’s first annual Customer Satisfaction Achievement Award for their innovative, cross-agency use of the American Customer Satisfaction Index™ to achieve website excellence. FCG CEO Anne Kelly and FCG COO Ron Oberbillig presented a plaque to Cindy Love, Technical Information Specialist, National Library of Medicine; Dr. Fred B. Wood, Computer Scientist, NLM; Dr. Elliot R. Siegel, Associate Director for Health Information Programs Development; Sue Feldman, Web Analytics Program Manager, and other members of the NIH team.

Larry Freed, President/CEO, ForeSee Results, Ann Arbor, Michigan, announced the 2006 E-Government ACSI. Citizen satisfaction rose in the final quarter, but remains at a standstill for the year. The 2006 e-government aggregate score is the same as the 2005 score—73.9. Nevertheless, an impressive 44 percent of web sites in the index saw their scores increase in the fourth quarter.

David Van Amburg, Director, and Forrest Morgeson, PhD, Chief Statistician, ACSI, University of Michigan, announced the overall annual 2006 ACSI for the federal government. They had good news. Satisfaction with federal government programs reached an eight-year high—72.3. The gap between government and private sector remained about the same, as the national ACSI increased to 74.4.

The ACSI survey methodology, developed at the University of Michigan, links customer expectations and perceived quality to customer satisfaction, which in turn links to key outcomes. The Federal Consulting Group is the executive agent in the federal government for the ACSI and expedites the survey review and clearance with OMB.

For more ACSI results, see FCG U.S. Department of Treasury's ACSI Results page.

Government Customer Care: Where Do We Go From Here?

By Daryl Covey, NEXRAD Hotline Manager, Radar Operations Center, and CSLIC Co-Chair Daryl.L.Covey@noaa.gov

We're accelerating into a pivotal era for customer support in the public sector. Never has so much attention been focused upon quality and responsiveness at the moment of truth when customer touches Government seeking a solution. Our community today is importing, adapting, and exploiting the effective customer paradigms of the private sector as never before -- while also increasingly recognizing the customer's voice as the true gauge of quality. Progressive agencies are reaching out with new processes compatible to the needs and preferences of those they serve while carefully ensuring quality and consistency across all customer channels, both traditional and new. Most significantly, we're discovering the indispensable value of sharing practices and perspectives across agencies and levels of Government, to maximize our collective effectiveness and ensure excellence in what we do. It's an exciting outset of things to come as practices, processes, and enabling technological capabilities continue to evolve, even faster than before, driven by the expectations of the customers and balanced by needs for efficiency in meeting them.

At the crest of the new wave of change washing across our world of public sector customer support is the guidance for levels of service to citizens created by the Citizen Service Levels Interagency Committee which you'll find the Proposed Performance Measures, Practices and Approaches For Government-wide Citizen Contact Activities. This nascent, living compact with those we serve facilitates the delivery of quality with practicality. By fostering and evolving it as a community, we create unlimited potential to surpass industry in the consistency of quality and responsiveness across channels by capitalizing on our inherent uniqueness with respect to economic competition. The winners here are universal, as we become more effective and those we serve are better-served.

And where do we go from here? My best effort at a road map for our future, assimilated in part from our discussions during development of the CSLIC guidelines, is at Cgov - 21st Century Government Customer Support. I hope you'll read it, consider it, and let me know what you think.

The Citizen Service Times is published by the Citizen Service Levels Interagency Committee (CSLIC), a project of the USA Services E-Gov Initiative. USA Services’ mission is “helping agencies serve citizens.”

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