Whether the grievance israt infestation, a littered alley or a busted parking meter, D.C. and its residents are not on the same page when reflecting on the quality of the government’s response to service requests.
The District claims to meet performance and on-time yardsticks for the vast majority of complaints received every year, but survey data through early December reveal widespread dissatisfaction among residents, spawning what Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration has dubbed a customer service “perception gap.”
Those gaps top 70 percent in some cases and have spurred an effort in the executive branch to reach out to frustrated constituents — before they fire off an angry survey response. Agencies are now expected to call back residents with more information about their service requests, including expected timing of the work and explanation of any delays.
“It really is a mess,” Rob Halligan, president of the Dupont Circle Citizens Association, said of the District’s customer service operation. “For them to tell us how good it is, I don’t think so.”
The gaps are dramatic. In the case of rat abatement, the Department of Health claimed to meet on-time performance 99.7 percent of the time in 2007, but only 22.9 percent of customers were satisfied with the response, creating a 76.9 percent gap. The Department of Transportation met its performance goals for 97.3 percent of all sidewalk repair requests, but only 31.1 percent of customers were content with the execution.
From sanitation enforcement to litter cans and alley cleaning, the reasons for the reported gaps differ from issue to issue, said Bill Howland, director of the Department of Public Works. In most cases, the problem is communication, he said, but “our numbers, from our standpoint, they’re better than the perception numbers here.”
“I would say for most of those, we have just not communicated or put a descriptive enough code into the [database system] tosay why we didn’t do it, or we didn’t get back to the customer to explain why it wasn’t done,” Howland said.
David Garrison, senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, said the data do not appear to be a representative sample of D.C.’s customers, though they should provide hints of the government’s problem areas. It could be, Garrison said, that many more disappointed residents filled out surveys than those who were satisfied.
By the numbers
2007 customer service perception gaps
» Alley repair: 72.1 percent
» Parking meters: 53.8 percent
» Litter cans: 52.6 percent
» Street and pothole repair: 52.3 percent
» Traffic signals: 51.1 percent
» Grass and weed mowing: 50.3 percent
