In government, success means more than just customer service

Private business learned some time back that long-term survival and profit are possible only if an enterprise is making those who use its product or service happy. Satisfy your customers on a sustained basis, it can be fairly be argued, and you have achieved a supremely important objective (a point suggested by Xerox in a 1993 publication, A World of Quality: The Timeless Passport).

The federal government, too, is paying increasing attention to the customer challenge. Exhorted by presidential orders, aided by polls and surveys, agencies are cranking customer focus and satisfaction into their strategies. The American people, it is often alleged, are government's ultimate customers. No doubt about it, happy customers are a major calibration on an agency's results barometer.

But let's also be realistic. Public agencies face realities not encountered in a corporate setting. First, their customers and the sources of their funding are usually not one and the same. Second, they work under constraints and oversight that don't impede private companies or nonprofits. Third, in government, satisfied customers are not invariably the best measure of results or of what is best for the country.

"We can easily have very happy customers in programs that efficiently put out money and place few demands on recipients," says one senior federal executive. "But that may be the worst possible result for the effectiveness of the resources. A happy customer is not always what the taxpayer should want."

A case in point, cited by the author of that quote, is the disability benefits distributed by the Social Security Administration. It would be nice to support beneficiaries to the limits of what each of them claims is necessary. But that would hardly be practical in a society where many interests compete for the available public resources (and it would violate fiduciary norms for which SSA also has a responsibility). The right result here-the one that best responds to both individual and national interests-is the optimum balance between the requirements of the claimant and of good financial stewardship of a public resource.

Put another way, customers are a key element in seeking the right result, and it's great if what you're doing makes them jump up and down with pleasure. But, for government managers, customer satisfaction is not the sole or final objective. In this democracy, Americans want results from government not only as individual customers of its services, but also as citizens intent on shaping a more peaceful, educated, compassionate, healthy, just, and creative society.

Reprinted with permission from The 2000 Prune Book: How to Succeed in Washington's Top Jobs, Council for Excellence in Government, Brookings Institution Press.