·     Differences in customer satisfaction ratings are attributable to customer service performance at the site level.

·     PCG research shows that in most IRS interactions with customers, differences in ratings are mainly driven by variables like case outcome and customer characteristics, not by differences in service performance at the site level.

·     Regulation RRA 98 requires customer satisfaction measurement at the site level.

·     RRA 98 does require customer satisfaction measurement, but provides significant leeway to organizational units in how they achieve that goal. Site level surveying is not required.

·     Managers and employees control the “levers” of customer satisfaction at the site level.

·     Particularly in a government environment where equality of treatment across units and regulations govern the interaction, managers’ and employees’ hands are often tied with regard to what they can do to please customers.

·     Customers themselves “co-produce” their service outcome with the assistance of IRS employees. Particularly for the IRS—and especially for TAS—customer confusion, mistakes, misdeeds, delays, and so forth contribute to their own problems and frustrations. Because the service outcome is co-produced, in many cases, the best way for the IRS to get things resolved is to inform, motivate, and educate customers to do their part of the job correctly.

·     Customer surveys are the best way to measure all customer service attributes.

·     Customers are notoriously poor—and in many cases biased—judges of attributes like time, fairness, and quality.

·     Internal operational, or “customer-facing,” measures are more accurate measures of attributes like elapsed time and service quality.

·     Improvement occurs by slowly but surely making incremental changes in existing processes.

·     Improvement occurs by revisiting the existing processes from the customer perspective and using those customer insights to change processes, products/services, and communications.

·     Learning by doing (vs. measuring) accelerates improvements.

·     Comparative measures of customer satisfaction ratings are the most effective way to influence employee behavior at the site level.

·     Recent organizational research suggests that comparing sites on customer service scores can backfire. Those rating high tend to attribute their success to their own superiority (and become complacent) and those with low scores tend to attribute them to factors beyond their control (and stiff arm the results).

·     Though there are problems with holding lower level managers accountable for customer satisfaction scores, it is the best system available for ensuring responsiveness to customer concerns.

·     Experience in the IRS and elsewhere has shown there is a better way. Below we describe a superior approach.