“How can we help?” A new social media service standard for Ontario

Editor’s Note: Our friends at Cabinet Office Marketing and Digital Strategy have been doing great work when it comes to social media in the Ontario Public Service. You can read more about their work on social media modernization, social media guidelines, and Ontario’s community manager on the blog. Today, they’re sharing a little bit more about the new social media service standard.

Whether you contact the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change (@ONenvironment) to report an environmental spill, or you have questions about purchasing a fishing license for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (@ONresources), there are public servants working to give you a consistent level of service across the government’s 150+ official social channels.

Starting Jan 1, 2018, we’ve taken that commitment to consistent service even further with a common service standard for social media.

The Government of Ontario has been using social media as a communications tool for over a decade. We’ve come a long way since the early days when we focused on broadcasting information to Ontarians; over the past few years, we’ve consciously shifted focus to citizen service.

While snail-mail is still a popular way to contact government, Ontarians are also embracing the speed and ease of use offered by social channels.

The public is moving from traditional forms of communications (phone, letters, etc.) to digital channels for customer service, and there is a growing trend in posts and comments from citizens.

An expectation for excellent service

In order to meet the changing needs of the people and businesses of Ontario, we needed to have a common service standard that would guide our work.

Here is our commitment to you:

• Staff-assisted social media services will be available from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday to Friday (excluding holidays) unless otherwise indicated.
• During these periods, all interactions which present a service opportunity will receive a response acknowledging or answering the request within 4 business hours.
• For acknowledged requests, a conclusive response will be provided within 5 business days.
• For complicated requests that require additional time, notification and/or an alternative communication channel will be provided.

Creating the service standard

Creating a service standard is not as simple as it looks. In order to create the Ontario social media common service standard, I worked with an amazing team and a passionate community of social media experts from inside and outside the public service. We went through a few steps to get to the standard you see today.

Make government channels easy to find

Before even thinking about a service standard, we needed to make sure the public could easily identify Government of Ontario accounts, and easily understand when and how they can receive service on those channels.

We started by standardizing our visual identity, from avatar to profile description. To begin, we developed an official naming convention for our accounts.

A standardized naming convention: just 1 building block in our enhanced digital presence.

We also posted business hours and response time indicators on all of our channels.

Got a question outside of business hours? We’ll do our best to reply on the next business day.

Create a standard in collaboration

Once the channels were easier to find, we began work in earnest on the service standard. We put out a call for volunteers across the public service and pulled together a bright team with diverse perspectives from all levels of government. We armed them with advice from international governments, private sector leaders and social media companies, too.

Three of the magnificent volunteers that helped craft the standard (L-R Antonella Zavarelli, Chantal-Marie Kerr, Patricia Szigeti)

We polled everyone from internal specialists and public servants to the citizens of Ontario to find out what people expect from government customer service on social media. We quickly learned that 40% of public respondents expect a response within five hours.

The public expects timely customer service on social media — and government is no exception.

Test, test, and test again

Once we had a draft standard, we paired our social media community manager with a data scientist to create some benchmarks for service request resolution. With those in hand, we asked government social media experts to test the first draft of the standard and provide real-world insights and recommendations.

Eight ministries participated in two rounds of testing the standard; we wanted to make sure whatever we put out as the final standard was achievable by ministries of all sizes.

The awesome MOHLTC social media team who helped test the standard (L-R Jacob Sheldon, Jag Dhamrait, Joann Assuro, Tuktuk Islam.)

The pilot was instrumental in:

• Testing response times to ensure that they are achievable and meet public expectations. For example, we increased the initial response time to 4 hours for social media professionals who have community management as one part of their role.
• Ensuring that each ministry was equipped to meet its audience’s unique needs by designing an overflow plan where Cabinet Office could provide support to ministries when they experience a high volume of customer service requests.
• Demonstrating the passion that our social media coordinators have in providing good service to the public. The pilot ministries were able to resolve 78% of enquiries within one business day.

After our testing and refining, we now have a unified standard of service across all 150+ Government of Ontario social media channels. We’re especially proud that our standard was developed and tested by the civil servants who are responsible for delivering the service outlined in the standard.

The common service standard for social media came into effect on January 1, 2018. It’s not a “next step” for government, but instead the achievement of more than a decade of trial, experimentation, iteration, change, and growth.