DATE: Tuesday, September 23, 1997           TAG: 9709230011

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: BY ANDREW C. KLINE 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

CUSTOMER SERVICE? NOT AT OUR STATE AGENCIES

How have we let the people who work for us, state-paid employees, become so inaccessible and unaccountable to us, taxpayers/customers?

The unattended, voice-mail telephone-answering system (press 1, press 2) was originally designed to speed callers to their final destination utilizing less labor. Our state agencies have tweaked and twisted these systems in a clear attempt to not have to deal with us taxpayers at all. They have perfected the endless loop, a run-around designed to never offer you an opportunity to speak with a live human being to answer a specific question.

Call the phone numbers listed in Virginia Beach for the various courts. Imagine you've received some notice that required some immediate response. The unattended voice system tells you: ``Due to a heavy influx of calls, we advise you to come down and conduct your business in person.'' There is no option for speaking to someone.

Hello! It's 1997, not 1897. We can E-mail messages around the globe in minutes, fax any document anywhere instantaneously, but in the city of Virginia Beach, we must leave work, drive to the courts, park the car, empty our pockets at the metal-detector parade and wait in line to get a simple question answered. Is there any consideration for the taxpayer/customer in this? No, none whatsoever. It is one of the worst cases of the public be damned that I have ever seen displayed. The commonwealth's attorney's office, which cannot get through either and uses a runner all day, tells me that the state uses the all-encompassing ``budget shortage'' excuse for this situation. This makes the commonwealth the only organization that I can think of in the 1990s that hasn't discovered it is less expensive to conduct business over the phone lines than in person. All it takes is management with both the will to serve the public properly and the talent and vision to make it happen.

The State Department of Taxation uses a different ruse with its unattended voice system. It has perfected the ``if we give you every possible scenario known to mankind as an option (press number 102 if you left your W-2 in your pants pocket and washed it with some liquid detergent; press number 103 if. . leave them alone. The department's phone system is designed to filter out as many people as possible so that they will hopefully never have to deal with any nuisance taxpayers at all. Of course, in doing so a simple query becomes a long, dreary conundrum of option-listening that robs you of your time while supposedly saving theirs. Excuse me, just who is supposed to be serving whom?

A simple walk around the court area displays all the little signs that the convenience of the agencies, not the customer/taxpayer, is of prime consideration. Look at the folks scanning the dockets at traffic court. Is the list alphabetized so they can find their case? No. Is it in numerical sequence of the case number so they can scan and find efficiently? No. It is printed out by the police officer's last name. There could be no worse method other than pure random for a customer to locate his name on the docket.

At the courts, everyone is told to report at the same time, even though their case might not be called for several hours. Could the times to report be staggered? Of course they could. I have employees who could take a couple of weeks' historical data at the courts and then write a schedule speadsheet based on average caseloads and times, etc. But I guess this might create a slight inconvenience for the court personnel, our employees, and would not be desirable.

As we prepare ourselves for another election season of candidates declaring that they hold the greatest family values, hate abortion more than the other guy and are willing to cut more taxes and spend more on the schools, I sure wish one of them would say that he is going to hire a customer-service czar to whip those who are supposed to serve us back into a serve-us frame of mind. MEMO: Andrew C. Kline is president of Payday Payroll, a Chesapeake

company that processes payrolls in nine states and Canada. His monthly

newsletter column, read by 400 Hampton Roads businesses, often is about

the erosion of customer service in America. KEYWORDS: ANOTHER VIEW

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