Votes In For Public Sector Customer Service Competition

Public votes totaling 16,523 have been  received from customers for the entity and person of their choice in the 2014/2015 Public Sector Customer Service Competition.

Public votes will determine  winners for the ‘Best Customer Service Agency’ and ‘Best Customer Service Officer’ categories, which are to be announced in the awards ceremony in October this year.

The competition is a biennial event staged by the Office of the Cabinet through the Public Sector Transformation and Modernisation Programme (PSTM) and represents the special emphasis placed by the Government on quality service delivery within the public sector.

Speaking at  a recent Jamaica House media briefing,  Chairman of the PSTM, Pat Francis, said the  competition judges are now evaluating individual agency submissions to determine the winners for the special categories.

“We are now in the process of evaluating that, and we are going to have secret shoppers coming around to see  that what is in people’s application, is really true,” she said.

Entities submitted entries in several categories, such as the Best Customer Service Entity, the Most Improved Customer Service Entity, the Most Creative/Innovative Entity and the ‘Best of Like’ Entity. Two new categories included in this year’s competition are the Most Responsive Entity and the Most Socially Aware Entity.

Mrs. Francis explained that the competition is a critical element of the Public Sector Transformation and Modernization Programme.

“Part of what we are trying to do in this modernization and transformation programme is to make it customer focused, to listen to the citizens and to understand what services they actually want and what is important to them,” she said.

“We in the past have probably been designing things for people based on our assumptions of what they want, rather than what they really need,” she continued.

Additionally, Mrs. Francis said that the Cabinet Office had surveyed customers of the various entities and will be looking at the findings with a view to redesigning some of the programmes offered.

“We are going to take the findings from this and re-design some of our programmes to ensure that we are actually delivering what it is that people want,” she added.