GUEST COLUMN.

When we were starting work on our first strategic plan at King County, where I was Deputy Director of Performance and Strategy for over a decade, we decided to gather data from community members about their priorities and our employees about their engagement. What we found changed our approach to what to measure and how to prioritize our work and offers lessons on how to let the data inform decisions, strategy, and the way to do your work.

We started by conducting a statistically valid community survey reviewing results to identify insights to inform our strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Challenges assessment. It was broadly helpful, in a contextual kind of way, and confirmed some of the things we were hearing via community forums. For example, we learned that county roads were a high priority for our unincorporated residents but received the lowest level of satisfaction. 

However, we had an interesting anomaly: a high number of “3” (out of 5) or neutral ratings and many “Don’t Knows” or DKs in survey-speak.

It wasn’t until the next time we did the survey, a couple of years later, that we found the same pattern and realized that the data wasn’t that helpful to us.  We deduced that as a county, we had three structural issues that were making the data less relevant.

The first issue was that as a county, we provide a lot of “wholesale” services. For example, although we treat the region’s wastewater, most people pay their water bill to the city they live in. When people hop on a bus, they identify with where they catch the bus, not the provider of the service. 

Get arrested in Seattle, you go to the county jail, but it's located in Seattle, leading many residents to think that the city ran it. Although everyone in the county is a taxpayer and therefore has a say, most people were directly using our services “through" other cities or entities and assuming that's who received their tax dollars.

The second problem that we faced in gathering good useful data was that we contract our services to cities. If you get police service in Shoreline, a community with a population of over 56,000, it’s a county sheriff in the car but the car has a city of Shoreline seal on it, not a county one.

Between the wholesale and contracted services, many people couldn’t accurately make an informed judgement about our services, because they didn't realize they were ours. They were left only with opinions and often those were neutral or DK responses on the survey.

Our survey contractor said: “Many jurisdictions get an overall score of 3 for police services but that’s the average between the 1s and the 5s. You have more than 50% of respondents giving you an actual neutral score. That’s weird.” He suggested a marketing campaign, something I knew would never fly given tight county budgets and how that would play with a political lens.

The third structural issue was that the county budget isn’t one giant pot of money, but is made up of over 100 separate funds, many with specific uses dictated by law. You can’t just take money from one program and fund others. The general fund can be seen that way, but the general fund was also the one fund that has always been under acute pressure, which reduces flexibility.

Given these three constraints, we pivoted to gathering information from our actual clients and customers: the people who used our services directly. We moved away from community-wide data collection and focused on “point of sale” feedback from people who interacted with us directly.

But this shift to customer service uncovered yet other issues. The first one was that we didn’t have a good way to gather routine customer experience data. And, as we started training staff about customer service and experience (CX) measurement, we quickly realized that we had put the cart before the horse and the external over the internal.

We had rushed into collecting CX data from the public, but by going upstream to the customer service staff, we found they were struggling with workload, old processes, inadequate data systems, or a feeling of disrespect on the front lines. Their negative experience with service delivery resulted in negative experiences for the recipients.

We realized that we needed to go back to those employee surveys and make improvements for the employees so that they would be more engaged and feel better about their workplace and in turn could provide better customer experiences for the public.

The highest scores or the lowest scores from the community at large didn't provide the roadmap we had hoped. What started out as “average,” very uninteresting scores, at least from a traditional positive/negative perspective, instead sent us on a journey that completely inverted our theory of change.

Yes, community-level priorities still matter in local government and that should not only be measured by elections. But in the county, those data weren’t very useful beyond every four-year views and didn’t inform us on what to improve operationally. 

Focusing on those average scores led us to focus on client and customer experiences, which in turn got us to focus on the employee experience. If the employees were engaged, and had both skills and improved processes, then they were going to provide better client/customer experience, which in the end meant better results for the community.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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