On December 10, I was a presenter at the Digital Government Institute’s seventh annual Government Customer Service Conference & Expo. My topic: "How to Measure the Quality of Customer Service E-Mail." The entire event was a success. The hall was crowded, the presentations were excellent, and the attendees' questions were focused and important.

Now, I won't stand for any sniggering out in cyberspace about the whole idea of government customer service. I've worked with contact centers in the corporate world and in the government; they're all striving to serve customers well on the phone, by e-mail, or on the web. And government customer service agents may have the hardest jobs of all. They field questions from everyone: actual customers and mere prospects, domestics and internationals, experts and novices. And satisfaction with government customer service can be very high.  Conference presenters Dee Clark and Debra Velasquez of the Environmental Protection Agency reported that their contact center earned a 95% on a recent customer satisfaction survey.

I thought you might like to download presentations and handouts from the December 10th conference.  Some of my favorites:

• Citizen Service Award Case Study by Mary Anne Bright of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).  NCI's Cancer Information Service is a 2008 winner of the USA Services 2008 Citizen Service Award and a leading scorer on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
• A form for assessing how easily your customers can contact you – provided by Kevin Paschuck of RightNow Technologies
• The EPA's Call Center's Path to Success – a brief story of how a call center that handles 5,000 calls, 3,000 e-mails, and 400 faxes per month does a great job.

Do you have a good or bad government customer service story to tell?  Let us know and we'll feature it here.

— Leslie O'Flahavan