Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > February > 24
Saturday, February 24, 2007
‘Your call is important to us’ - really
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Listening to Joe Doyle talk about his job is about like listening to a bubbly schoolboy — exuberant, innocent and unpretentious, seemingly unaware of the public’s cynicism about his work.
And who can blame them — the public, that is?
For up to 56 minutes some of them have sat on hold, awaiting a response to a simple telephone call to state government. More than six out of 10, when forced to wait an eternity for an answer, hang up and walk away. Such is the fuel of public cynicism.
“In three years, I have become very bullish on them,” Doyle says of state employees. “They are just as good, just as competent as those who work for any bank or any other company. They want to do a good job.”
Doyle is director of the Governor’s Office of Customer Service, charged with making parts of it more efficient and more consumer friendly.
The eternity some callers have been parked on hold is an example of what people hate about government and, frankly, many large corporations. The state gets 50 million calls a year. Of those, 10 million general information calls are handled by 27 call centers, most staffed by state employees. One, handling park reservations, is out of state, in Maryland. None is out of the country.
A 2005 study revealed that of the 10 million calls answered, 930,000 were misrouted. At one center, callers were placed on hold for up to 56 minutes. Up to 62 percent of all calls answered were abandoned while on hold. Taxpayers, meanwhile, were paying $8.17 per call handled, well above the industry average of $6.37. A year ago in January, Gov. Sonny Perdue decided to do something about it, creating the Office of Customer Service, a first in the nation.
The quick news is the success. When Doyle took the job in January of 2006, the average time to answer a call was 4 minutes and 42 seconds, though 17.3 percent of incoming calls were not answered at all. By December, the average to answer was down to 1 minute, 39 seconds, with 11 percent unanswered.
The standard is to get calls answered within 37 seconds, with no more than 7.5 percent missed. Across the 27 call centers, time on hold has been reduced by 65 percent, from an average of 5 minutes to 2, saving callers 3 minutes per call. Some 600,000 calls previously abandoned while parked on hold are now handled.
The improvement has come with the same money and the same staff. By working with existing employees and managers, without asking them to perform any more tasks, Doyle has made significant headway, prompting him to rave about the quality of state employees. “The way to envision the call center project is that we are creating an enterprise approach to managing calls, as opposed to having 26 different approaches,” says Doyle. Standardizing the system will improve efficiency, lower costs and permit data collection that allow Georgians to know how well their government is performing.
Conservatives are often accused by their critics of hating government because they want to create it in a new image. Nobody could ever accuse Doyle of hating it. There is, in fact, a kind of sweet innocence in his enthusiasm, and in his faith that government can be made permanently better by, in this case, training people to do a smarter job, collecting data and making it transparent.
It’s worked before. Doyle, over 30 years in business, helped to turn a struggling formal wear rental company, Mitchell’s Formalwear, into a prosperous nationwide chain, After Hours Formal Wear, with more than 200 locations in 15 states in 2000. Doyle was 53 when he and his partners sold the chain to May Co., a big department store chain, in 2002.
He had the same general impressions of government that most callers-on-hold do. He had never met Sonny Perdue. “I spent 30 years building the business we had and I spent 4 days a week traveling, so I wasn’t connected to the Atlanta business community,” says Doyle. But he did know Tommy Hills, the state’s chief financial officer. Or at least they had met 30 years ago, when both were in the Jaycees.
He dropped him a note and volunteered to help. “I didn’t want to go to my grave just being a critic of government.” He’d take a job without concern for salary. “I would just be doing it for a love of Georgia and for the sense of accomplishment.”
His conversation is part business geek, part ’60s idealist.
“I don’t see this as a program that costs government money; it is using the same money to do a better job. It’s not building government,” he said. It’s making it better.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Permalink | Comments (53) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
