How regulators can take three steps to customer satisfaction

_This post is written by Kerri Fergusson, manager of the compliance response & investigations unit, Auckland Council. _

• The problem: ‘Customer’ is often not clearly defined or understood in the regulatory compliance context, yet customer satisfaction surveys are usually standardised for all customers of an organisation.
• Why it matters: Customer satisfaction is often a measure of success for government agencies.
• The solution: Analyse the ‘problem’ and focus your solution on that, such as the ‘three steps to customer satisfaction’ approach.

Regulators and those that work in the field of Compliance and Enforcement are often confused as to who our customer is. This may also have a bearing on the organisation you work for. In immigration, customers for most of the organisation may be those applying for a visa, or employers wanting to sponsor workers for a visa. From an enforcement point of view, the customer may be the citizens of the country who need to ensure the integrity of the immigration system is sound, to protect them from potential harm from any non-compliance of regulations or legislation.

When things go wrong, this is where the regulatory compliance side of the business needs to step in, and then identify who the customer might be.

When you ask a regulator, be it an investigator or a compliance officer, ‘Who is your customer?’, the question may invoke a response that is either a sometimes-confusing discussion of what a customer may be to them, or silence because they just do not know. For others, the answer is often “we don’t have customers”.

Many government agencies have a customer-facing, or customer-centric area - such as for the police, where victims may report a crime, people need to apply for licenses or permits. For other agencies, they may regulate some area for the public such as liquor licensing, food licences, consents and permits. This is usually the ‘nice’ side of the business that the compliance team has not had any input into. Our customers want something, and usually it is not hard to achieve that for them.

Bringing in the big guns

When things go wrong, this is where the regulatory compliance side of the business needs to step in, and then identify who the customer might be.

This is relative to customer satisfaction because we often consider ‘Key Performance Indicators’ as a measure of success when considering performance of our teams, and customer satisfaction is often one of those measures. So understanding who that might be suddenly becomes relatively important to the team, unit, department, and organisation if it is an important indicator to measure success.

Unfortunately, the indicator is usually set based on the ‘nicer’ side of the business, but put into the same bucket for the regulatory arm with similar expectations of achieving high customer satisfaction. As an example, if the organisation must process a permit within five working days from lodgement, we usually get a high score in a customer satisfaction survey if we achieve that. We celebrate this score, but then put the same survey to customers of the regulatory compliance side of the business where if for example the outcome was not what was expected by the customer, the team usually scores low on the customer satisfaction survey.

The differences between these two scenarios are vastly different, yet often measured the same via a standard survey and results shown on lovely graphs where we talk about success or failure based on the result.

A real-life example

We were seeing lower than expected customer satisfaction scores via monthly reports for the compliance unit. There were, however, themes that were coming through from the surveys the customers were submitting. This gave us a ‘problem’ to focus on for improvement.

When dealing with a ‘customer’ in the regulatory compliance sense, we tracked the comments and narratives with the survey and saw the trends from the positive responses were often that “we were kept up to date; the officer seemed to care about our complaint; we were given an explanation as to the outcome”, compared with the negative being “we never heard back after we made our complaint; we called often but were never updated; we didn’t agree with the outcome/decision”.

Regardless of whether we can interpret who our customer is, it seems clear they are concerned about three things: a high level of communication, especially in terms of contact details being provided and having someone to go to directly if they have more information or want updates; giving them updates on where their complaint or investigation is at; and the outcomes are clearly explained.

Whilst we cannot always provide the outcome or decision that the ‘customer’ was wanting, usually the fact that we took the time to keep them updated and provide an explanation as to our decision, was what they wanted, and we saw a correlation of positive narrative in customer experience surveys, if these things were present.

As a result, my unit has put a lot of time and effort into ensuring we are contacting customers (complainants) and updating them on outcomes. i.e The outcome may be ‘no breach’ of a regulation, if we take the time to explain that the customer then understands, and there is some education to the public taking place at the same time.

We have started to audit our officers’ notes to ensure they are following the ‘three steps to customer satisfaction’:

1. Initial contact with officer details to enable direct communication rather than via a very busy call centre
2. Updates along the way
3. Conclusion with reasons before closing the case

This approach has seen our customer satisfaction scores increase month on month over the past six months to get to the highest score in two years.

The main takeaway from this is that we need to consider ‘who is the customer’ without necessarily having a clear definition, so any problem areas may be identified and responded to,based on their need. For regulators, this could be as simple as ‘any person or stakeholder involved in your response’. Then consider a simple process such as the ‘three steps to customer satisfaction’, and if you do not see improvements, re-visit the problem. Importantly, if you see improvements – let your people know!

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)