Dinowitz questions discrepancy between 93% and 33% satisfaction scores

I have one other question.

I may come back to the GPS, but in your testimony, you said you're pleased to share with the council a report by an independent third party on the public satisfaction with NYC 311, that it's a rating of

customer satisfaction rating of 93%.

A little while back, I passed legislation that required customer satisfaction feedback surveys to be done at the end of the calls or allow people on the app to fill those out.

And on that, in your internal surveys, the customer satisfaction, just looking at it now, is 33% strongly or agree or regularly agree.

That they're satisfied.

Can you explain the discrepancy between the system that we enacted per law and this outside firm that you hired for customer satisfaction?

I appreciate that question.

And yes, I can.

So we'll start.

There's two sides, so to speak.

So I'll start on the information that I shared.

The customer satisfaction survey that we do is a third party resource.

CFI Group Inc.

That's their name.

They are the leaders in American Customer Satisfaction Index survey in science.

We've been using them for several years.

It's a really nice independent approach to having someone.

Contact customers who have interacted with the 311 call center.

It's a pretty robust survey, multiple questions, and pretty robust response, statistically valid response rate.

And that's...

Their methodology is what evaluates how the customer feels about their experience with the 311 call center representative.

Okay, so I just want to be clear.

The representative themselves, we're talking about satisfaction with their interaction with the representative, not necessarily their satisfaction with the way their service request was fixed or not fixed.

That is fair.

I'll amend it just slightly, the experience with the representative themselves, but also that whole 311 experience, right?

Okay.

Calling, reaching, having the conversation, that the rep is polite and professional, all of that.

That's what that score is for.

Good.

And I think that's an important clarification.

You hire great people who have very good interactions.

And at the same time, people's quality of life concerns, only 35% satisfaction score are really addressed in the meaningful way.

And that was the purpose behind that previous legislation, to make sure there's transparency around how the service requests are being not handled by the call service person, but handled really by the agency if the problem itself was fixed.

Both things could be true at the same time, that the person on the other end of the line is great and the agency didn't live up to the standards we expect.

So that was a previous 311 bill that I passed that I think really sheds a lot of light on this.

And this other one going forward, the GPS location, is going to make life a lot easier for New Yorkers, maybe even get that satisfaction score on your website up.

All right.

Thank you, Chair.