Page 2364 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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In addition to problems in identifying savings, there are a few alarm bells about the level of service that will be provided, and possibly lower expectations of service standards in areas covered by the Shared Services Centre. This may not bring the Western world to a halt but, for example, in 2006-07 the average time taken for telephone service requests to be answered by the InTACT service desk was 15.54 seconds. The government had aimed to have only two per cent of these service requests being responded to outside the time frames set by its service level agreement. Instead, 10 per cent of these service requests were outside these times.
Confronted by this somewhat unappealing figure, one would expect that the appropriate officials would have a look at the cause of the situation and aim for better service next time. They might even decide that they had set their sights too high and revise their target. If they did so, you would expect they would at least aim to match their existing performance, and hopefully get better. Instead, in light of its failure to meet this target—its failure to get anywhere near this target—the government has not just revised its new target to reflect existing levels of service but it has set a new target for 2007-08 of an average waiting time of 25 seconds, over 60 per cent higher than the average time taken last year. This is a clear sign that the government is lowering its expectations of service. Presumably, it does not want to fail to meet its target again, so it has taken the easy route: set the bar as low as possible. It has even set it below the current level of service, which itself was clearly a failure.
One might cynically assume that there was an attempt to conceal this piece of information by changing the performance measure for the item, and it only came to light as a result of an answer to one of my questions on notice to the Treasurer. It is hard to say how many more of these instances have occurred where the government has obscured its poor performance or its lowering of targets by changing the relevant performance measure. It is certainly clear that a number of the performance measures have been changed in the budget, and that the outcome of discontinued performance measures has not been reported as an interim measure.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I have a bit of a self-developed theory about service standards—that is, the higher you make them, the more people complain and the harder it is to keep people happy. There was a particular hotel in this town which I will not name where the general manager said: “I ignore every single complaint I get. I throw them all in the bin.” He said, “Eventually people realise there’s no point in complaining because nothing ever happens.” It is a very interesting approach to customer service. It is not one of which I am a particular advocate; maybe somebody has come up with that theory elsewhere and believes that is how you stop people becoming unhappy: don’t give them the service they expect. I may be a little unkind to these folk. There may be good reasons why they have had to change the standard of service, but I do wonder about it.
Problems with the superannuation system continue to exist. We still have not seen a resolution to existing problems in areas covered by the Shared Services Centre. In particular, problems with the HR system CHRIS 21 are still unresolved. The government has not been able to fix this problem. Indeed, it has not even been able to provide assurances as to the scope of the problem or a timetable for fixing the problem. It has not been able to give a ballpark figure of the number of public
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