Provide Excellent Customer Experiences

The Postal Service is dedicated to delivering excellent customer experiences. The Customer Insights (CI) measurement system provides a comprehensive view of the customer experience across the most frequently used customer contact channels. Touch points of customer contact are:

• Business Service Network (BSN) — The BSN survey is event based and measures the customer’s level of satisfaction with their BSN account representative.
• Point of Sale (POS) — The POS survey is event based and measures the customer’s experience at retail locations.
• Delivery — The delivery (receiving) survey is a hybrid relational⁄event-based measurement of the level of satisfaction with how residential and small⁄medium business customers receive their mail.
• Customer Care Center (CCC) — This live agent survey is event based and measures the customer’s satisfaction with dealing with a CCC agent.

Customer experience is measured across four touch points, then weighted and aggregated to create a national composite CI score. The modular components and flexible design of the national composite CI score allow expansion and inclusion of additional points of contact to meet the quickly changing customer landscape. To support the USPS mission of delivering excellent customer service, the CI composite score is a component of the USPS National Performance Assessment (NPA) system which links the CI performance score and the employee Pay for Performance system. This emphasizes that each and every employee is responsible for ensuring our customers receive exceptional service.

FY2015 Performance Report — Customer Insights ended the fiscal year achieving a composite score of 85.73 percent compared to its target of 86.70 percent. Even though this narrowly missed the target by about 1 percent, the Postal Service can point to substantial improvements in the response rates of various CI components. The response rate for the retail POS survey, for example, increased significantly — approximately 500 percent. To achieve this, we provided additional training for our retail employees in key markets and asked customers for their feedback by circling the Web address on their receipts. We also rolled out training that focused on improving key elements of our retail customers’ visits. By using QR codes and interactive voice response systems, and fostering an environment of effortless accessibility for our customers, we’ve been able to make notable strides in capturing additional customer insights. Expanding the ways customers could respond to both the POS and Delivery surveys has increased opportunities for customers to share their experiences. (See the following table.)

FY2016 Performance Plan — In the next fiscal year, the Consumer and Industry Affairs department will build on its cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders from all customer contact channels to improve customer focus and drive performance. The CI program will continue to be used to measure performance and drive improvements at our customer touch points. Our CCCs are well-positioned to improve FY2016 performance by addressing the three key drivers of customer satisfaction — accessibility, knowledge and professionalism. The call centers will make even better use of our agent quality program, enhanced agent refresher training, technological advances in integrated voice recognition software and immediate agent coaching. Also, a revamped delivery survey will provide more visibility into the customer’s experience with mail delivery so we can better address possible carrier-related issues and identify areas for improvement.

Additionally, we’ll continue to develop videos, publications, service talks and training for employees to provide education and highlight elements of our customers’ visits that matter most to them. We’ll continue to work to improve response rates to our surveys.