Provide Excellent Customer Experiences

The Postal Service is dedicated to providing 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 Postal Service’s mission of delivering excellent customer service, the CI composite score is a component of the NPA system which links the CI performance score and the employee PFP system. This emphasizes that each and every employee is responsible for ensuring our customers receive exceptional service.

FY2016 Performance Report – Customer Insights ended the fiscal year achieving a composite score of 87.62 percent compared to its target of 86.70 percent. Through increased employee focus and effort, the Postal Service was able to exceed its target by nearly 1 percentage point while driving substantial improvements in the response rates of various CI components (See table below). For example, the response rate for the retail POS survey continues to exceed previous years. Training our retail employees to ask customers for their feedback by circling the URL address on their receipts has been a key to driving the response rate. We also rolled out training that focused on improving key elements of our retail customers’ visits. By using Quick Response (QR) codes and interactive voice response systems, and fostering an environment of effortless accessibility, 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.

FY2017 Performance Plan – In the next fiscal year, the Postal Service will build on its cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders from all customer contact channels to further 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. (See U.S. Postal Service FY2016 Results and FY2017 Targets for Corporate-wide Goals for FY2017 CI target.)

Our CCCs are well-positioned to improve FY2017 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.

*Represents total POS financial transactions.

Note: Customer Insights is a corporate-approved and compensated composite performance measure. Targets for the four subcomponent categories of Customer Insights (BSN, POS, Delivery and Customer Care Centers) are set and compensated at unit level.

The delivery survey is undergoing some changes that will affect the way it’s scored. The FY2016 survey is scored by measuring only the “overall satisfaction” question, which doesn’t account for the other questions that are asked. In FY2017, the delivery survey is changing to a delivery index score that will be comprised of both a carrier survey and a PO Box survey. The carrier survey score will be the sum of four weighted questions for both residential and small/medium business (SMB) customers. In addition, two new questions are being introduced, which 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. (See the following chart on Delivery Composite methodology.)

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.