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The National Institutes
of Health (NIH), founded in 1887, is one of the world's foremost medical
research centers, and the Federal focal point for medical research in
the United States. 26 Institutes and Centers comprise the NIH, which
has the primary research goal of acquiring new knowledge to help prevent,
detect, diagnose, and treat disease and disability from the rarest genetic
disorder to the common cold. The NIH mission is to uncover new knowledge
that will lead to better health for everyone.
In 1993, President William J. Clinton issued Executive Order 12862 challenging Federal agencies to improve customer service. Further, Executive Order 12862 tasked agencies to survey their customers to identify what kinds of services they really want and to gather ideas from front-line employees on how to better deliver those services. The goal of this Customer Service Plan is to convey to you, the customer, a realistic, achievable approach for improving customer service at the National Institutes of Health. NIH is committed to improving the way it offers high quality services that are easily accessible to every American citizen. With this in mind, this Customer Service Plan is organized for your convenience. Customers may look at Attachment 1 to find some examples of activities going on at NIH that are organized by customer groups, consumers, health professionals, other governmental agencies, and grantee organizations. We want the plan to be as user-friendly as possible, and we welcome your comments and suggestions.
[ Return to Menu ] Executive Order 12862, "Setting Customer Service Standards" requires Federal agencies to:
[ Return to Menu ] This Customer Service
Plan is based on ideas, suggestions, and feedback received from our
customers as well as an extensive best practices search. It defines
our customer service standards and processes for building and maintaining
high quality services to meet those standards throughout the country. The following principles
drove the process for developing the plan:
[ Return to Menu ] APPROACH/SCOPE NIH is diligently
working to address the spirit of Executive Order 12862. A dedicated
group of representatives from across the agency is convening to form
an on-going Customer Service Management group to implement the customer
service program and to ensure that the agency enhances its customer
focus as it improves current services and develops new initiatives. The agency has gathered
information from customer service surveys, focus groups with front-line
staff, and conversations with key external partners, to ensure that
initiatives address issues important to our customers. This plan presents
an opportunity to share with our customers our commitment to providing
quality service.
NIH is committed to protecting, promoting, and enhancing the health of the American people and to improving its processes to offer high quality services that are easily accessible to the public. The Customer Service Plan establishes a broad framework to address customer issues. The customer service standards address issues our customers have told us are important to them.
The primary focus of this document is to ensure that we are continuously listening to our customers and making certain that their needs are being met or exceeded. While the focus is on our outside customers, it does not diminish the need to ensure that our internal NIH customer needs are also being met. It is imperative that an integrated view of all our customers' needs be pursued in order to ensure that the needs of our entire customer population are met. If we do not provide outstanding service to our internal customers, we will be unable to provide outstanding support to our external customers.
[ Return to Menu ] The NIH serves four primary external customer groups--the general public, health professionals, other governmental agencies, and grantee/contractor organizations. These four broad categories encompass the populations that we serve and work with most often. When the agency embarked on this process, we felt it was necessary to define and limit our primary groups. As we continue with our customer service initiatives, we may include additional customer groups.
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The standards described in this report represent the NIH effort to identify the needs and concerns of our customers and to establish measurable processes to address these needs and concerns. The standards have been developed from information gathered from surveys/focus groups, and benchmarking with other outstanding organizations and are based on measured performance attributes - a set of criteria that expresses customer requirements and expectations. Performance attributes are organized into two categories.
The following attributes
were used to develop the standards:
Process Attributes
Quality Attributes
[ Return to Menu ] The following standards apply to all customer groups. All NIH Customers are entitled to:
In addition:
[ Return to Menu ] FUTURE
EFFORTS
Over the coming months, the agency will:
[ Return to Menu ] For further information, call (301) 496-2461.
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Last updated on: October 18, 2002 |
Office of Management Assessment National Institutes of Health |