Ethos Issue 4, Apr 2008

Service Beyond Excellence
Ng Hock Keong

The fact is that given a choice, customers prefer to self-help and complete their transaction without waiting. And there are e-ambassadors around to assist them with this. We implemented the e-appointment system in 2005, where customers could book a face-to-face appointment ahead of time. So now you wait less than 10 minutes to see someone, and the counter staff would have had time to prepare your case, know what you need, and prepared a solution for you. The allocated transaction time is 30 minutes, but in fact it takes less than that because the process has become much smoother.

So by freeing up less value-adding channels, we can now offer different strokes to different folks, instead of the traditional one-size-fits-all approach.

We can now also sift out people who cannot use the e-channels and make options available to them. For instance, we have a Club 55 service for senior citizens who are probably less IT-savvy and need more personalised help. It would be wrong to force them to use e-services. At Club 55, they are served by specialists within 20 minutes.

Our Customer Service Officers (CSOs) are now also freed up to go out to the community. We started off with old folk’s homes, community centres and roadshows, to help people in the heartlands check their CPF balances, and take home very useful messages about their CPF and personal finances. We call them the "CPF m-ambassadors". If someone were bed-ridden without a support system, the m-ambassador could make a house call and help them. For the past few national projects, we were able to do sign-ups at community centres, instead of requiring citizens to come to the CPF building.

And we have done all this with a stable headcount of 1,300 staff. In fact, for the past three years, we have met the 3% headcount reduction requirement, without affecting our customers’ service experience with us.

Are there other new services you have introduced that represent a fundamental change in the established way of doing things?
E-concierge is one such service. It started as feedback from some customers, who emailed us to ask us to perform certain transactions, without using a conventional form. By traditional cost-benefit analysis, it does not make sense to develop a process just to cater to such exceptional, low-frequency tasks. But the customer does not really care whether his transaction is high-volume or exceptional in nature—he only cares about the outcome he needs. Yet if we look at the customer’s instructions and the desired end result, we realise that we can perform the transaction without putting in place a new process. So now we let customers put in a free-form request from the e-concierge page and we can perform his transaction, once we have confirmed who he is, what he wants and how to serve him. It has changed the entire traditional mindset of form-based transactions. Now you can tell me what you want, and I will serve you.

From the Board’s perspective, this is more costly in terms of time and resources than a structured form. For instance, the human element is now needed to decipher the request, just as when reading an email. But it is far better than having to manage the customer who has come to the counter to kick up a fuss, or writing letters to argue over why the request cannot be processed in that way. In fact, departments spend less time performing the transaction than trying to explain to customers why they cannot carry out their non-standard instructions.

This e-concierge concept is a bold initiative that no one else in public service has tried so far. But in fact, there is no risk, since authentication and confirmation still take place. And as a public service agency, we actually hold a lot of authenticated information and can do specialised transactions for customers that even commercial banks cannot access. There is the potential for tremendous value-add to the customer.

Of course, the initial fear was that customers would only use this e-concierge system instead of the prescribed forms. But our operational experience has been the opposite—customers would rather tell you precisely what they need, by using the correct form if they could. This is really a last resort solution for them, and if there is in fact a standard form that customers can be redirected to, they quite reasonably proceed to complete the process on their own. The end result is that we can say “yes” to customers a lot more often, and we end up with a much better service experience overall.

You have said that CPFB goes beyond excellent service delivery to furthering national objectives by creating more informed, financially self-sufficient customers. Could you elaborate?
I think the big picture we are out to achieve is to make sure our greying population has enough for their retirement. So we need to move beyond a transaction-based relationship, i.e., you want this now, we carry it out quickly for you. Instead, we should leverage on the basis that people trust us since we have given them good service. Our transaction time also represents valuable interaction time with the customer; they are a captive audience.