Mint Condition

So Diehl and his colleagues got to work. A task force was formed to work on the two issues. Three months later, the group had made some progress. But Diehl knew that it would take more heat to get the fires going: "We had to put our reputation on the line." He went public with his customer-service agenda. To a very active hobby press, the general media, and a nervous Mint staff, Diehl promised that from then on, the Mint would process 95% of its orders within six weeks. That was far from Diehl's ultimate goal -- but it was a big improvement over existing performance.

His gambit worked. The sense of urgency increased, and a sense of accountability to external customers kept the pressure up. "Our task force figured out how to meet the six-week goal," Diehl says. "Then it set a standard for processing 95% of all orders within four weeks. Over the past five years, we've tightened the standard several more times. Today, we are delivering 95% of our products within two weeks, and we're delivering some products within one."

Those tangible achievements touched off a wave of customer-service improvements at the Mint. Incoming calls to the new customer-service center, located only four miles (but a world away) from the old facility in Lanham, get answered, on average, in 17.5 seconds rather than in 2 minutes. Letters about problems or complaints get handled within 3 days, rather than the 42 days it took 3 years ago. Returns or credits get issued in 3 days versus 31.

"Five years ago," says Cullinane, "most people at the Mint, and especially the people in customer service, believed that their job was to protect the assets of the U.S. government. Before we send you your coins, we're going to make sure that your check clears, that your credit is good. We really believed that customers were trying to defraud the government or take advantage of us. Today, we have gone to the other extreme: The customer is right. The customer is king. We want our service to rank with the best in business."

It does. A few years into Diehl's tenure, the Mint (along with several other agencies) got permission to be part of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, an annual poll conducted by the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan Business School. Talk about a turnaround. The Mint received the best scores of any agency included in the study. But based on its scores, the Mint would have ranked second in service among the 200 private-sector companies in the poll -- just behind Mercedes-Benz North America and tied with H.J. Heinz.

Kevin Cullinane feels the changes personally. "The interest in our products is just phenomenal," he says. "A few years ago, if I went to a party and said I worked at the Mint, someone might say, 'How about those dollar bills?' when, of course, we make coins. Today, when I tell someone I'm from the Mint, you can see the excitement: 'What's happening with the new quarters? I loved the one for New Jersey!' "

Change How You Think about Change

The first wave of change at the Mint was impressive -- but inadequate. It was certainly better to answer a customer call in 17 seconds than in 2 minutes. And it was better to deliver orders in two weeks than in eight weeks. But the challenges at the Mint ran deeper than what such technocratic fixes could solve. There were fundamental problems with strategy, marketing, even how the agency defined the business it was in. Put simply, the Mint had an identity crisis. Was it, essentially, a passive manufacturing organization that responded to the demands of Congress and the Federal Reserve? Or was it a market-driven organization that could launch product innovations, introduce new promotional campaigns, and change the game in a business that it has been in for 200 years? "The Mint needed a new story to move it into the future," says Diehl. "So the story of the Mint was retold, starting with its founding by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The story reminded people that the Mint was on the leading edge of the industrial revolution and was one of the first manufacturing companies in the United States. Telling that story helped to create a new spirit among the staff. It got us further out of our bunker mentality."

As the leadership of the Mint thought more deeply about the agency's identity and future, one of its first insights was that its product offerings were flawed -- especially when it came to collectibles and commemoratives. For one thing, it was selling too many of them. Five or six times a year, Congress would come up with an idea for a commemorative coin to raise money for a pet cause. But these programs, based more on political calculations than on market demand, were highly unpopular with collectors. It got so bad that in 1995, the coin-collecting community actually threatened to boycott the Atlanta Centennial Olympic commemorative -- which would be competing with five other commemoratives in circulation.