Saturday, March 09, 2013

Customer Satisfaction

Recently got my car serviced at the dealers (which doesn't happen often because I don't drive much).  There were a couple followup customer satisfaction surveys, and the counter guy (not the right designation but the guy who wrote up my paperwork) said his pay depended on my satisfaction.

I mention this because I've never run into this followup with any government office, whether FSA, DMV, SSA, IRS, or whoever.  I don't know why.

Actually I do: government agencies figure their customer has to come to them and government appropriators see no need to provide money to measure customer satisfaction.

Though I dinged Al Gore for his Reinventing Government initiative, I think I remember that he tried to emphasize customer satisfaction. At least back when management was looking at county service agencies there was a survey Len C. ran.  I'm a bit skeptical of both the one-time survey and the followup one like the car dealer did.  I doubt the data is really accurate because I tend to be over generous, but I do think trends, particularly in the followup ones, would be informative. 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

FSA has a "Receipt for Service" form with posters posted in county offices notifying customers that we would like some followup. It seems that customers of the government have lowered expectations to some degree than they would of retailers, etc. I know it has been that way, but I don't believe that just because someone "needs" the government that they should have to be subjected to poor customer service. Part of good customer service is efficiency which both the customer and the government could benefit from.

Bill Harshaw said...

Not to be obsessed with metrics, but I wonder how many of these forms the national office gets in a year, and who gets them?

Anonymous said...

I would hazard a guess of close to zero. Apparently the form has been out for some time but no one knew about it till recently. Really we should be past the form already and on to "text or email your comments/concerns to..." There is also the problem of "what incentive is there for the county office to get excited about it?"