Many would cringe at the thought of going to a government department. It is because of the lousy customer service they expect to receive when they are there. The customer service in almost any government departments is far from desired. In a study by McKinsey in 2016, found customer service in government offices, both state and federal levels had the lowest customer satisfaction when compared to all other industries. Such findings should not come as a surprise to most of us as many would have perceived poor customer service in government departments, even if you have never visited such offices.
What gets measured gets done!
But not really in a government department. Though the leadership of a public service department wants to improve customer service, they often fail in their well-intended initiatives because they tend to take a simplistic solution to a deeply rooted problem ingrained for a very long time. Due to the hierarchical structure in government departments, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) often face difficulties in creating clear ownership, resulting in poor accountability to drive and improve the KPIs. For example, to improve customer service, the government would usually implement a customer satisfaction survey program. Such programs are often poorly designed and badly executed that it is very susceptible to gaming, resulting in un-reliable survey results to drive any meaningful actions.
Also, improvement initiatives centered around customer service are difficult to implement in public service because often, it is not the lack of skills or knowledge among the employees that results in a poor customer service outcome. Government employees get good and regular training on improving customer service and productivity, but the skills learned in the training is usually not put to use at the workplace. Employees lack the interest and drive to provide better customer service because there is no clear accountability in improving customer service in government offices.
What gets measured and DISPLAYED, gets done!
Suppose every government office has an automated process of seeking your satisfaction rating using the Netpromoter System (NPS) and asking just two questions upon completing your transaction.
Question 1: On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend your friend or family to engage the service with this government office?
Question 2: Tell us why you give us the above rating?
And your rating is displayed in real-time on a big TV screen where everyone in that office can see. Imagine the immediate behavioral change this will have on the employees handling their customers. We should be able to see a marked improvement in customer service because now their action will directly impact the survey rating that is transparent. To avoid the gaming of the customer survey, the office where its results are displayed should not have a hand in the execution of the survey and the display of the survey results. A truly independent office should be accountable in managing an unbiased NPS survey for all government offices and display the results to the appropriate office without any interference or influence from anyone.
Employees will try to be more courteous in their interaction with their customers and that act in itself is half the battle won in improving public service. While such actions may be sound superficial in the beginning and not sustainable in the long run, the transparent improvement in the NPS score will motivate other employees within a government office to also take accountability in improving interaction with their customers by proactively taking small improvement actions. With the easy to understand NPS results, management of that office can supplement these small actions by individual employees with more structured actions such as specific training to improve the employees’ skills in customer service.
In addition, these results could be rolled up at department or state level and monitored by government performance improvement bodies in real-time for horizontal improvement initiatives. The results could also be displayed at headquarters where the government senior leaders could view. When this happens, every employee and their supervisors on the ground will take serious efforts to improve their NPS score and will consciously create a positive experience on every customer they serve.
Netpromoter System (NPS) is a groundbreaking Customer Experience tool used by many companies, big and small across the world. The system was first coined by Frederick Reichheld of Bain in 2003. It is based on asking one question that is – On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend a service or product to a family or friend. Customer quantitative feedback can be collated into three distinct groups. Those who rate 9 and 10 are promoters, 7 and 8 are passives while those who rate 6 and below are detractors. The NPS score is the percentage of promoters minus percentage of detractors which means the score would have a range of -100 to +100.
