Performance Monitoring & Evaluation TIPS: Conducting Customer Service Assessments

This assessment is a management tool for understanding USAID's programs from the customer's perspective. Most often, these assessments seek feedback from customers about a program's service delivery performance. The Agency seeks views from both ultimate customers, who are the end-users or beneficiaries of USAID activities, and intermediate customers, who use USAID resources, services, or products to serve the needs of the ultimate customers. Customer service assessments may also be used to elicit opinions from customers or potential customers about USAID's strategic plans, development objectives, or other planning issues. For example, the operating unit may seek their views on development needs and priorities to help identify new, relevant activities. USAID's reengineered operating system calls for regularly conducting customer service assessments for all program activities. Experience indicates that effective customer feedback on service delivery improves performance, achieves better results, and creates a more participatory working environment for programs, and thus increases sustainability. These assessments provide USAID staff with the information they need for making constructive changes in the design and execution of development programs. This information may also be shared with partners and customers as an element in a collaborative, ongoing relationship. In addition, customer service assessments provide input for reporting on results, allocating resources, and presenting the operating unit's development programs to external audiences. Customer service assessments are relevant not only to program-funded activities directed to customers external to USAID, but also to assessing services provided to internal USAID customers. USAID guidance specifies that all operating units should develop a customer service plan. The plan should include information about customers' needs, preferences, and reactions as an element in a unit's planning, achieving, performance monitoring, and evaluation functions. The plan should identify the ultimate and intermediate customers for service delivery and segment customer groups for different programs, products, or services. It should also describe and regularly schedule appropriate means for assessing service delivery, performance, and customer satisfaction. Customer service assessments complement broader performance monitoring and evaluation systems by monitoring a specific type of result: service delivery performance from the customer's perspective. By providing managers with information on whether customers are satisfied with and using a program's products and services, these assessments are especially useful for giving early indications of whether longer-term substantive development results are likely to be met. Both customer service assessments and performance monitoring and evaluation use the same array of standard social science investigation techniques, such as surveys, rapid and participatory appraisal, document reviews, and the like. The steps in conducting a customer service assessment include deciding when the assessment should be done, designing the assessment, and implementing the assessment. The assessment should be conducted whenever the operating unit requires customer information for its management purposes. The general timing and frequency of customer service assessments is typically outlined in the unit's customer service plan. The assessment should be planned to coordinate with critical points in cycles associated with the program being assessed, as well as with the Agency's own annual reporting and funding cycles.