Night plane to Juba: customer satisfaction in the aid business
It was past midnight and I was trapped somewhere between a futile attempt at sleep and an equally futile attempt to watch a bit of unwatchable in-flight entertainment. All this on a Frankfurt to Addis flight, en route to Juba in South Sudan.
It was the eighth or ninth announcement, delivered in no less than four languages, which pushed me over the edge.
Each of the seven or eight preceding announcements had pulled me from my half-sleep and interrupted the in-flight entertainment. So as you can imagine, I was dying to hear what this particular announcement was about.
Customer satisfaction. A survey.
The message delivered in a deadpan mechanical way that did nothing to convey the sincerity of the words uttered: “We want to know what you think of our service”.
Oh, sweet irony.
And timely food for thought, since I was on my way to Juba to start testing an approach to more systematically and deliberately understanding and acting upon consumer (beneficiary, client) perspectives on the assistance International Rescue Committee (IRC) provides. Notes to self:
- Don’t ask people for their opinions at the wrong time, in the wrong way.
- Mean what you say and follow through to demonstrate that meaning in more than words.
- Don’t waste people’s time. They've probably got other, more important things to do.
Feeling annoyed about being subjected to consumer satisfaction made me not want to fly Ethiopian Airlines again. But I have a choice (up to a point — Juba not being the most well served airport on this planet). The same can’t be said for humanitarian clients under most circumstances.
Of course, none of these observations were new and my colleagues and I had talked about these and many other ideas many times before leaving the cosy world of headquarters thought experiments. But still… there’s nothing like direct experience to remind you of how it feels to be surveyed in ways that seem intrusive, pointless or irritating.
And so to South Sudan: over recent weeks and months we’ve been examining how we collect and respond to information about the preferences and perspectives of the people we seek to serve.
The IRC is committed to becoming more responsive as an agency, which implies both better knowledge of what our clients want, think and feel about the experience of interacting with an aid agency and a more deliberate focus on whether, what and how we will do things differently as a result of this knowledge.
We’ll be looking both at what the IRC is currently doing to understand and respond to client perspectives and trialling some promising practices developed by others in the aid business. In the case of South Sudan, we’re working with Ground Truth to test out their light-touch approach to actionable feedback, itself derived from humanitarian practice and the consumer satisfaction industry.
The IRC is also committed to sharing insights and data transparently and my colleagues and I will be blogging and writing about these experiences as we go.
I fully expect a whole range of other “direct experiences” that give pause for thought and re-orientate action as we engage with the disparate realities of field and headquarters staff, partner agencies and, most of all, the clients whose voices we want to hear.
An earlier version of this story was published on the International Rescue Committee’s blog on 11 December 2015
