Re: General Public vs. Gov't Customers

["Paul Epstein" <epstein@pipeline.com>]

John, the "brass" of your agency are on the mark to want to measure customer
satisfaction of the other government agencies that use the LA Co. MTA as
well as general public customer satisfaction.  They're both important, and
both ought to be important parts of a strategy to attain and maintain high
levels of customer satisfaction, or as us consultants often shout, to
"exceed customer expectations!"  That said, you correctly recognize that
different measurement strategies are needed for different kinds of
customers.  Where you've got thousands of individual general-public
customers in a pool of millions of potential customers, you're correct to
figure on using general public sample surveys, user sample surveys, and
maybe selected focus groups if you want to find out more detailed
information.

When it comes to other government agencies as customers, you have to ask the
more fundamental question of what your agency wants to do with the
information.  Frankly, I don't think it's worth the effort to get
user-agency opinions unless the MTA is going to use the information as part
of a broader customer service improvement strategy.  If that's why the MTA
wants the info, then the MTA ought to have some form of regular customer
service relationship with the its customer agencies--to know personally who
the "customers" are--the high level decision makers whom you assuredly want
to keep happy, and, either the direct users in those agencies who use the
MTA to help accomplish their work objectives, or some "customer contact" in
each agency who can be in touch with those users for you.  The point of this
kind of customer satisfaction is for you to find out how well your agency
helps these other agencies accomplish their goals and missions, not just
whether they like the service.  So you ought to do a 100% survey of your
customer contacts, and perhaps also of higher-level decision makers in the
user agencies, and, in addition to asking general satisfaction questions,
ask questions about how well the MTA helps their agencies accomplish their
goals and objectives in serving the public.

The MTA ought to know what those agencies are trying to accomplish when they
use the MTA, and be prepared to do what is in the MTA's power to improve
service to help them accomplish their goals, while still meeting the needs
of, and providing excellent service to, the riding public. If it's really
important to the MTA to satisfy government customers, then you shouldn't
stop at surveys, but should have regular contacts to find out how to do the
job better for these customers, and provide opportunities for immediate
feedback (e.g., user response cards, a customer service phone no., web site
comment space) whenever someone wants to report a service problem, report
excellent service, or otherwise comment on service.  Presumably, the MTA
could--and maybe already does--provide the this kind of immediate feedback
opportunities to general public users.

For a government "how to" reference in you own neighborhood, I suggest you
get in touch with LA County's Internal Services Department (ISD).  Call the
Executive Office and ask for the people who coordinate customer service
improvement and customer surveys for ISD.  In ISD's case, virtually all
their customers are other government departments, so they are very familiar
with this issue.  ISD has done customer surveys of these departments for
many years, and has recently been revamping their surveys as part of a
bigger customer service improvement strategy that has emerged from a recent
strategic planning process.

I was the Project Manager for Performance Measurement for the LA firm that
helped ISD redo its strategic plan.  ISD did quite a good job using a
balanced scorecard approach to developing new performance measures
(including customer service measures) linked to their strategic plan.  But
that's another story.

I hope you find this response helpful.

--Paul Epstein
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Phone: 212-349-1719  Fax: 212-349-4054  e-mail: epstein@pipeline.com

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