San Diego has contracted with San Francisco-based experience management company Medallia to help it do more, more quickly around both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) during the next year. Among the takeaways:
• The contract comes out of work by the city’s Performance and Analytics Department, which is charged with overseeing resident and employee satisfaction surveys. Last year, Jon Terwilliger, the department’s performance management program manager, told Techwire that staffers re-evaluated the methodology by which those surveys were conducted — surveying residents one year, employees the next, then repeating — and realized “it wasn’t really as frequent a feedback as we needed to be responsive and make the changes that we wanted to make in the organization.”
• Officials have been monitoring the soliciting of internal and external feedback for about five years and take the process’s temperature on an ongoing basis to ensure they achieve the intended outcomes.
“That kind of led us to re-examining … how we wanted to go about soliciting EX and CX for the city,” Terwilliger said, adding that the goal is “to align employee sentiment with customer satisfaction and see what the linkages are there and really be able to effectively gauge the two together.”
• The city is interested in key outcomes and will pivot from surveying “a statistically valid sample size of the city’s population,” now more than 1.4 million, to “what we call a pulse survey methodology,” the manager said. This will center on more frequent surveys as opposed to the “more robust” but less frequent surveys it previously deployed. San Diego will use Medallia’s platform to drive internal survey participation as near 100 percent as possible, and to boost external response rates as well.
Officials will use a “sprint” approach to launch surveys, working first to ensure the workforce is engaged and has good contact levels. In early spring, it will work more broadly to gauge employee sentiment, and do some one-off surveying in other departments. As work builds to the pilot’s end, the city will look at integrating into its other platforms to enable a look at customer satisfaction. Three city departments that may be engaged via the new platform are its planning, parks and recreation, and sustainability departments, Terwilliger said. Future public-facing survey topics are still being determined but will likely examine the degree to which services provided meet customers’ expectation levels.
• San Diego’s contract with Medallia, finalized at the end of August, takes the form of a one-year pilot. It will cost the city $140,000. A second RFP next year for a longer-term contract is likely following this pilot. Asked whether this contract may lead to other opportunities for the tech sector, he said not necessarily, but added: “The city works with a lot of different IT vendors as the business cases present themselves.” A second contract in connection with the pilot, with an implementation partner, is in the works.
“Now, more than ever, state and local governments want to understand how their residents are feeling and what actions they need to take to improve their services,” Nick Thomas, Medallia executive vice president for global public sector, said in a news release.
