Carolyn Colvin stepped down as acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration January 20th when President Donald Trump took over the White House. Since then, we have not heard much from Colvin, but she recently discussed her nearly four years as the head of Social Security in a recent interview with Mckinsey & Company.
The interview focused mainly on Colvin’s approach to customer service, something Social Security is routinely criticized for due to the fact that Social Security faces continuous funding shortages to provide the type of customer service Colvin strived for.
Below we have provided excerpts from the interview.
Question: What are your organization’s goals related to customer experience?
Colvin: The way I see it, our customers don’t have a choice when it comes to obtaining our services. They can’t go to a competitor if we are not performing well, so we have an even greater responsibility than does the private sector to provide a great experience for our customers. We also need to ensure that all agencies provide a consistently excellent experience, because the citizens do not separate, for example, the SSA, the US Postal Service, and the Department of Homeland Security in their minds. To them, we are all the same, so if one of us performs poorly for them, it affects their perception and confidence in the whole system.
Question: How do you measure success for customer-experience programs?
Colvin: Customer satisfaction is an agency priority. So, we leverage our Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) to conduct in-depth customer-satisfaction studies and measure how we are meeting our priority goals. We’ve set ACE up to be a central hub of data and customer analytics within the organization. The mandate is to understand the various data we have across the organization that could provide insight for how we operate and serve customers. We are creating a culture where decisions are based on good data and insight. To that end, ACE supports workforce skill development, ensuring that staff from every level of the agency have the analytic skills to draw insights from data, especially to help improve the experience.
Question: How do you measure success for customer-experience programs?
Colvin: Customer satisfaction is an agency priority. So, we leverage our Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) to conduct in-depth customer-satisfaction studies and measure how we are meeting our priority goals. We’ve set ACE up to be a central hub of data and customer analytics within the organization. The mandate is to understand the various data we have across the organization that could provide insight for how we operate and serve customers. We are creating a culture where decisions are based on good data and insight. To that end, ACE supports workforce skill development, ensuring that staff from every level of the agency have the analytic skills to draw insights from data, especially to help improve the experience.
As you have read, Colvin said that customer service at Social Security was a priority despite the fact that many times customer service lacks at the agency. The fact remains that an under-funded and over-worked staff at Social Security would find it difficult to improve customer services without additional resources.
