Cape commissions customer satisfaction survey

Cape Girardeau officials, curious about how residents feel about the city, have hired a Colorado-based research firm to gather answers through a resident survey.

The city will pay $20,000 to the Boulder-based National Research Center, or NRC, to send a customer satisfaction survey to 1,800 city residents and 1,000 businesses early next year.

NRC will send a three-to-five page mailed survey -- likely in January or February -- to a random sample of residents, said city clerk Gayle Conrad. Three hundred will be sent to residents in each of the city's six wards as well as to businesses throughout Cape Girardeau.

The company estimates a final report will be ready by the end of April.

While the questions have not been finalized, the focus looks to be on the city's customer service, city manager Scott Meyer said. Also integral, he said, is the company's database of results from other communities. That will show not only how one city department compares to another but how those departments compare with other departments across the country.

That's a much fairer system, Meyer said. For example, the police department may not score as well as other Cape Girardeau departments because of the nature of what it does, he said.

"If you're going out and arresting people, that may affect your score," Meyer said. "If your job is primarily telling people they're not doing something right, that will inherently drive down your score. It's more fair to look at other communities to see what the expectations should be."

Meyer hopes the survey will help them identify strengths and weaknesses so adjustments can be made.

That's exactly how the survey's results are intended to be used, said Shannon Hayden, a senior research associate with NRC. The questions are developed with city staff and other officials, she said. The company, which has administered the survey more than 200 times in 41 states, was especially pleased, she said, to see Cape Girardeau was including businesses in its survey.

"A lot of communities don't always include businesses," Hayden said. "Cape Girardeau is taking that extra, inclusive step."

Questions could also ask about quality of life, transportation, housing, public safety, parks, culture and civic activity, Hayden said. The company expects anywhere from 450 to 720 completed resident surveys and 50 to 150 returned business surveys. The company cites about a 5 percent margin of error.

Measuring performance

The survey is part of overall strategic planning, Cape Girardeau City Council member Mark Lanzotti said. Lanzotti said the council and staff has been looking at how to measure performances in government.

"We wanted to see the city run in some ways more like a business," Lanzotti said. "That is, we wanted to have it evaluated. ... You first have to figure out what you're going to measure and how you're going to measure it."

Council members have also discussed repeating the survey in future years to create an annual report to measure progress in areas that are lagging.

That's being done in other cities, too, such as in Richmond Heights, Mo., where city leaders commissioned a survey with NRC two years ago, to answer questions about how their 10,000 or so residents felt about where they lived.

"They have it down to a science," city manager Amy Hamilton said. "They asked easy-to-understand and effective questions. It was so beneficial to us to get a gauge of how we were faring."

Hamilton said Richmond Heights will take a second survey in 2012 to monitor improvements.

"You can track feedback you got the first time around," Hamilton said. "We did pretty well, but we had some areas that needed improvement. We want to see if it's being made."

smoyers@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address:

401 Independence St., Cape Girardeau, MO