Bring back customer service

March 4, 2007
Tom Ferrick Jr.
Inquirer columnist

I hopped into a cab the other week to scoot from one meeting to another, made a quick call to check my messages, and tucked my cell phone back into the pocket of my raincoat. Or so I thought. Later, I realized the darned thing was lost.

I thought: Maybe it slipped out of my pocket onto the back seat and the cabbie retrieved it. Luckily, I had a receipt for my trip that included the cab number and the cabbie's license number. I called Olde City, only to be told it was not one of their cabs. (As it turned out, it was. They were just giving me the brush-off).

Call the Philadelphia Parking Authority, they said, and they will track down the cab's owner and the cabbie. PPA, in case you missed it, is now in charge of regulating cabs in Philadelphia, as part of its ever-expanding patronage empire. I called the PPA number the folks at Olde City gave me. And called. And called. And called.

Welcome to Voice Mail Hell, Parking Authority Division. Each time, I left a message saying what I needed and asking for a call back. I never got one. When I finally did reach a live person, they immediately switched me over to another number and I got - tah dah! - another voice mail message. It took me six days to finally reach a live person and find out that the PPA's Lost & Found
Department did not have my cell phone.

What's missing from this picture? A notion called customer service. And, though the PPA is a state-created agency, I've heard similar, numerous complaints from citizens about their dealings with city government. Long waits for someone to pick up the phone. Unresponsive clerks. Unanswered voice mails, etc., etc.

As Colleen Puckett, a longtime civic activist, put it, people want their government to be "efficient, transparent, logical" and - if I may add a word - responsive. I mention this in the context of the mayor's race. While the candidates are busy telling us about how they are going to rid the city of crime and poverty, bring back jobs and prosperity, and reform the political process, we should keep in mind that an important part of the job, if elected, will be to
make sure someone answers the phone when you call a city agency.

The core function of government is to deliver city services and enforce local ordinances. Surveys taken by the city indicate most agencies do that job fairly well. In public polls taken over the years, police and fire services get solid B+ ratings from citizens. The Streets and Recreation Departments, to cite two others, get C+ ratings. Civic and community activists, though, give much lower grades to the bureaucracies they must deal with, a list that includes Streets,
Licenses and Inspections and city housing agencies.

"Simply getting a return call is a very complex thing," said Farah Jimenez, executive director of Mt. Airy USA. "I don't know why that has to be." There is also a feeling - widely held among these activists - that the situation has gotten worse during the Street administration. I can speculate as to why.

In the last eight years, the budgets of the city's core bureaucracy - think Revenue Department, L&I, Public Property, Records, etc. - have declined as the city has placed more resources in two huge categories: public safety and employee benefit costs. To put it another way, maybe the Revenue Department picks up on only 39 percent of its incoming calls (according to a recent study)
because there are fewer people to answer the phones.

On the other hand, what would you rather have: someone standing by the phone at the Revenue Department, or another police officer patrolling the streets?

The next mayor won't be awash in cash. He will face the same tough decisions on where to spend tax dollars. Anyone who says it can be fixed simply by doing away with waste, fraud and mismanagement is kidding himself and kidding you.

There are two steps that could be taken, without much cost: One is to offer financial incentives to employees who go above and beyond in serving the public. In the private sector, they are called bonuses. Another is to place an emphasis on customer service and measure agency performance on how well it meets goals of being efficient, transparent, logical and responsive. The federal government (now that's a bureaucracy!) is doing it. Through the Office of Management and Budget, it is evaluating every federal agency on performance criteria and posting the results on the Web, including the ones that get F's. Go to Expectmore.gov to see it.

Expectmore. I love that name. In the meantime, anyone find a cell phone in the back seat of a cab lately?