How May I Help You?

Vera Katz

Mayor
City of Portland
Portland, Oregon

The best way to find out how well we're serving our customers -- the citizens of Portland -- is to ask them. For the past eight years, we've mailed a survey to almost 10,000 citizens, asking them to rate the performance of our police department, our water bureau, our environmental services, our public transportation, and other city bureaus. We also ask our citizens the following questions: Do you feel safe walking at night in your neighborhood, in your parks, in your downtown? Are the streets clean enough? What do you think of the city's speed limits? How do you rate the parks and recreation services? And how do you rate the livability of the city?

We benchmark those results against those of six other cities. And if we're not doing as well as those cities, we try to find out what they're doing that we're not. We mail the survey results to residents, and I hold an hour-long television show to go over some of the finer points of the survey.

Asking people how they feel -- and responding to them -- is more important today than it's ever been, especially when it comes to government. People have lost a tremendous amount of faith in government. At the local level, we have a great opportunity to help citizens regain that trust. We need to remember that it's citizens who pay our salaries, and they expect accountability from us.

Vera Katz has been serving the city of Portland's 500,000-plus customers since 1993. She has received many accolades, including "Governing" magazine's Public Officials of the Year Award for 1994. Before becoming mayor, Katz was the first female speaker of the Oregon House -- a post that she held for three terms. The City of Roses, as Portland is known, has twice ranked in the top 10 on Fortune's "Best Cities for Business" list. To get a copy of the city's "Service Efforts and Accomplishments" report, call 503-823-4082.

Kent Williams

Senior Vice President of Property and Casualty Operations
USAA
San Antonio, Texas

Our company motto is "We know what it means to serve." That's not just a little slogan. We think of people not as customers but as members, as part of our family. For example, a few years ago, during some heavy ice storms up north, an elderly woman named Mrs. Lawless called. She was the widow of a deceased military officer, and she got Stephanie Valadez, one of our representatives, on the line.

Mrs. Lawless explained that she was sick, that she was without her medicine -- and that she was freezing in her home in upstate New York. " 'My husband told me that if I ever had a problem and didn't know where else to turn, I should call USAA. He said you would take care of me,' " Valadez remembers Lawless saying.

Valadez put the woman on hold and contacted the Red Cross. And that afternoon, someone took care of Mrs. Lawless, making sure that her needs were met.

But here's the twist: When Mrs. Lawless phoned in and Valadez called up her computer file, she found that since Mr. Lawless's death, no active policy had been continued with our company. I suspect that most other companies would have hung up on Mrs. Lawless. But hanging up isn't part of our mind-set. That's what we mean when we say that customer service is a relationship, not a transaction.

Kent Williams (pc.ops@usaa.com) oversees USAA's general agency, along with its seven regional offices that serve more than 3 million members around the world and bring in more than $5.2 billion in premiums each year. He joined USAA in 1997, after serving in the U.S. Coast Guard for 32 years and retiring as a vice admiral. The United Services Automobile Association was founded in 1922 by 25 U.S. Army officers who needed automobile insurance but were considered to be too transient, or were deemed "bad risks," by traditional insurers.

Nancy Kramer

President and CEO
Resource Marketing Inc.
Columbus, Ohio

These days, every client I talk to says the same thing: "We want to own the customer." But when it comes to the Web, you cannot own customers unless you earn them.

How do you do that? By doing what you say you'll do. We've found Web sites that say that someone will get back to you, but no one does. Or they say, "Here's a place to ask us about our product" -- and they have a disclaimer that reads, "We cannot always answer every question that we receive." There are more examples of sites that do service the wrong way than there are of sites that do it the right way.