The city of Salisbury, North Carolina, conducted a citizen survey in July 2004 to enrich its performance measurement system with customer satisfaction outcome measures across 13 service delivery areas. One question included on the survey addressing customer service caught our attention. Resident feedback regarding whether “city employees are courteous” acted as a red flag for a city with a vision of promoting a positive business climate for economic opportunities as well as being a place where individuals want to live.

Respondents were not overly critical, but it was apparent that the majority of residents were ambivalent about how they were treated by city employees. City Manager David Treme’s response was that the city could move forward in one of two ways. The first was to address this issue as simply one of the several areas that needed attention based on the survey results. The second was to address it from the perspective of fundamentally transforming the organizational culture.

This article describes the customer service intervention used by the city to begin the process of changing the organizational culture, including how customer service became the city’s hedgehog principle—a concept described in the book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap—and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins—to unify the organization and its most valued asset: employees.¹ We begin this article with background information on Salisbury before we describe the customer service intervention used to initiate the culture change.

We then present the results, including a citizen survey conducted in March 2009 to demonstrate the quantitative outcome. We conclude with a discussion of the adage, “It’s a journey, not a destination.” In other words, an intervention is only the first step toward a never-ending commitment to change.

Building on the Past

The city’s commitment to change is well documented. After relying primarily on workload measures to populate its performance measurement system, the city joined the North Carolina Benchmarking Project in 1999 as a means of embracing the higher-order measures of efficiency and effectiveness and for comparing its service performance against other municipalities in North Carolina.² A further commitment to change was made in 2002 with the hiring of a budget and benchmarking analyst to help departments use the comparative data for reengineering their processes and procedures for service improvement.

The city had experienced a reduction in force the year before in response to the governor withholding intergovernmental revenue in order to balance the state’s budget. The city manager felt that department heads needed internal technical assistance with using performance and cost data to implement change, even during a time of budget stress.

The city realized, however, that a missing component of its performance measurement system was qualitative feedback from citizens on service delivery. The city applied for and received a two-year grant from the National Center for Civic Innovation, a nonprofit organization created to facilitate the ability of local governments to adapt approaches for improving performance and communicating more effectively with constituents.³ A major part of this initiative is the Government Trailblazer Program, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to encourage citizen involvement in the priorities and actions of local governments. The first year of the grant funded a citizen mail survey in 2004. The second year of the grant funded three distinct focus groups over a two-week period in 2005; the focus groups targeted business leaders, neighborhood and nonprofit leaders, and citizens.

The survey results showed that the city was doing an exceptional job in the areas of solid waste, police, and fire. Feedback on city streets, however, was negative, a rating that was used to justify funding increases in asphalt maintenance and repair. The survey results that were particularly alarming were that 43 percent of the respondents felt that city employees were courteous, while the remaining 57 percent of respondents were either indifferent or disagreed. The objectives of the three focus groups were to identify what good customer service looks like and to obtain feedback on how the city should document, report, and communicate performance to its citizens.

Customer Service Intervention

The city manager, as part of his ongoing commitment to professional development through the ICMA credentialing program, was exposed to the hedgehog principle as described in the book, Good to Great, when he attended the Senior Executive Institute at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. The book describes how some organizations are able to simplify a complex environment into a single idea, which then becomes the linchpin for holding various parts of the organization together, transforming the organizational culture, and becoming a high-performance organization.

The manager had the city leadership team read Good to Great to begin the educational process of transitioning the organizational culture. Employees began training based on the concepts contained in the book, and the resulting discussions began to focus on customer service as Salisbury’s linchpin, or hedgehog principle. Building on feedback from these employee meetings and the focus group findings of 2005, the city manager and the leadership team adopted customer service as the one unifying concept across all departments.

Over several months, they also began to feel strongly that customer service was indeed Salisbury’s hedgehog principle for three important reasons. First, customer service transcends all departments regardless of their differing goals and objectives. Second, customer service is an integral part of successful service delivery. And third, employees recognized customer service as the defining measure of success for the city.

The next step was to embark on real change. The city hired a facilitator to collaborate with human resources staff to guide the organization through a customer service intervention. The purpose of this type of intervention was to foster among all city employees an attitude of providing excellent customer service—the core competency that would set Salisbury apart from other local governments. The customer service intervention became something much more than simply required training for all city employees.

The first step in the intervention was to secure employee involvement and ownership of the process. This began with the selection of a dedicated group of frontline employees from across the organization to serve as the customer service design team. The group’s mission was to develop and coordinate the improvement process. They adopted a motto—“Salisbury is driven to serve”—and identified and defined 10 keys to excellent customer service. After the customer service intervention was framed, all levels of management and employees attended training. Strategies were then implemented to build on the positive momentum; for example, the creation of a public communication campaign, the establishment of customer feedback processes, and the communication of success stories.

As the intervention phase of the culture change continued, other strategies were identified and implemented. Each department integrated the customer service model into its service delivery areas. Another critical step was to develop an internal communication plan to share and model employee success stories. The concept of customer service is now part of the hiring and evaluation processes. A customer service perspective also is required for all key organizational decisions.

As the city manager says, “The number one priority of the city is to provide excellent customer service to all citizens. It is our goal to build a high-performing municipal organization that accomplishes the goals and outcomes set out by our citizens and city council.”⁴

Intervention Success

After two years of hard work toward building a culture of excellent customer service, the city manager authorized funding of a follow-up survey for gathering hard evidence on whether progress had been made. The survey was conducted in March 2009, using the same survey techniques and vendor as the 2004 survey.

Survey results showed that the city was continuing its exceptional job in the areas of solid waste, police, and fire. While the feedback on the quality of streets continued to be low compared with other service areas, the increase of annual funding for asphalt maintenance and repair did pay dividends. Approximately 39 percent of respondents were satisfied with the quality of streets in 2009, compared with approximately 25 percent in 2004.

The survey instrument also contained a question on whether city employees were courteous, which represents a major dimension of customer service and allowed for a direct comparison with the previous survey. The survey results showed that 68 percent of respondents felt that city employees were courteous, while the remaining respondents were either indifferent or disagreed. The 25 percent increase provided the city manager with positive feedback in two different ways.

First, the increase supported the decision that a customer service intervention was needed and that change had been made. Second, it reinforced what was advocated in Good to Great: commitment to a hedgehog principle—customer service in the case of the city of Salisbury—that is never ending and that always requires additional progress.

The broader story in Salisbury is one of meaningful employee involvement and customer service being an integral part of service delivery. Citizen satisfaction improved in 12 out of the 13 service areas contained in the 2009 survey.

Another way to measure success with management philosophies and techniques is whether a local government’s methods are adopted by others. Now more cities in North Carolina, including Concord and Lenoir, are implementing within their own organizations a customer service model based on the success of Salisbury.

These cities, however, are implementing a customer service model rather than the customer service model. Returning to the first step of the customer service intervention, employees across each separate organization must come together and design the process together for ownership and empowerment to occur. A canned approach simply does not work when a true commitment is made to change organizational culture.

Conclusion

A critical part of any type of intervention is to articulate clearly that continuous improvement of customer service never ends and requires an ongoing or lifetime commitment to change. It’s a journey, not a destination. This ongoing commitment was one of the main reasons why the city manager initiated the process described in Good to Great. The customer service intervention has resulted in Salisbury becoming one team operating under a single unifying principle. Providing excellent customer service embodies the city’s vision and mission.

To further the city’s commitment, customer service was adopted as one of the city’s six core values. It is a culture of excellent customer service, quality services for all citizens, honesty and integrity, inclusion and diversity, fairness and equality, and commitment to a team of creative problem solvers. Because of this holistic approach to change, the manager regularly shares with staff the fact that he has received more customer service compliments in the past year than in the previous 10 years combined.

Endnotes

¹ Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap—and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
² A. John Vogt and Paula Few, Performance and Cost Data: Phase III City Services, Medium and Smaller Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, School of Government, 1999).
³ See the National Center for Civic Innovation, www.civicinnovation.org, for additional information.
⁴ City of Salisbury, North Carolina, Annual Performance Report and Survey Findings 2009–2010, www.salisburync.gov/community.

William Rivenbark is professor, School of Government, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina (rivenbark@unc.edu). Evans Ballard is budget and benchmarking analyst, Salisbury, North Carolina (eball@salisburync.gov).