Cape Girardeau seeking feedback from residents on customer satisfaction

Cape Girardeau residents will have a chance to sound off to city hall this summer through a customer satisfaction survey that will seek opinions on how well -- or poorly -- respondents rate city services.

The city council recently appropriated $20,000 to pay for the survey, which is still in the preliminary planning stage, city manager Scott Meyer said Monday. Meyer is currently searching for a company to contract the work to, he said, adding he expected the surveys to start sometime this summer, he said.

"We're looking at the survey to give us some benchmarks, a way to measure customer satisfaction," he said.

The questions will be asked during a random telephone survey that will seek input on customer satisfaction with municipal services such as trash pick-up, the utility billing office, law enforcement and buildings inspections. Meyer got the idea for such a survey while attending a Missouri Municipal League meeting last year.

As part of a program Meyer calls "Tangible Results," city department heads are updating council members once a month on a rotating basis about their departments. Meyer said the city also wants to hear from residents.

"It's important to us, if you're looking at Tangible Results data, that customer satisfaction be a part of that," Meyer said. "We can take that information and compare ourselves to other cities and learn something about the job we're doing."

The data will show city officials where there is room for improvement, he said, but also will allow them to gauge customer satisfaction here with other towns to see if some departments are traditionally lower ranking because they are intrinsically unpopular with customers.

"Some departments just typically make people mad," Meyer said. "So if our inspections department gets a 4 out of 10, we can look if that holds up in other places too. But basically, we just want to see what we can do better."

This is the first customer satisfaction survey on a citywide level in recent history, said assistant city manager Heather Brooks.

In 2007, a mail survey was conducted on 3,000 city residents throughout the community as part of the DREAM initiative, she said. Respondents also could answer questions on the Internet and there were a total of about 851 completed surveys. But that survey's questions were largely limited to the downtown area. Another city survey was conducted in 2005 as it related to the city's comprehensive plan, she said. None of those specifically gauged customer satisfaction, she said.

smoyers@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address:

401 Independence, Cape Girardeau, MO