Often a constituents' interaction with a congressional office ends after the office replies to a request, letter or email. But how do constituents view these responses and what is their overall satisfaction with their Senator or Representative? By inviting feedback after an interaction, offices can find out what influences constituents' satisfaction. Moreover, some marketing research suggests that the act of asking for feedback, in itself, improves satisfaction. In a true customer service culture, you would invite feedback from your customers through every communication and venue. Congressional offices shouldn't be afraid to do the same. While it may seem daunting to collect additional data for staff to sift through, here are ways to use constituent satisfactions surveys to better your relationship with constituents.
Why You Should Do This
Chief of Staff Tim Hysom with Congressman Lowenthal (CA-47) discussing his office's participation in the Congressional Management Foundation's Congress 3.0 project. The office participated in an experiment in conducting constituent satisfaction surveys and despite some concerns, Tim saw inherent value in asking for constituents' feedback.
What We Learned
- Send a dedicated email asking specifically for feedback. Sending a dedicated customer service survey solicits a significantly higher response rate than simply including a link below the Member's signature on response emails. And the act of reaching out directly to ask constituents for feedback buys you goodwill. In one constituent survey test, 10% of constituents who were asked to fill out a survey did so, whereas less than 0.1% of constituents responded when it was tacked on to the end of a response email.
- Survey constituents every 3-4 months. Research results showed a significant drop off in response rates for constituents who had not interacted with the office within the past 3-4 months. By narrowing this parameter, instead of surveying everyone once a year, you ensure that an interaction is still something the constituent will recall, and it gives you more fresh data on office performance.
- Link constituents back to your webform. If they need additional assistance or want to sign up for your e-newsletter, they can do so here without you needing to muddle the survey responses. If constituents have other concerns besides giving you feedback about the services you provide, they can make sure they are posing the questions in the right format.
- Decide what you want to take away from the survey. Do you want constituents to feel more appreciated and don't plan on doing anything with the data? Are you planning on making changes in your office based on feedback received? Know in advance what YOU and your office want to take away from conducting a constituent satisfaction survey.
- Consider having a separate casework survey. Casework is often complicated and very specific. Sometimes you can do everything possible to help a constituent, and still not achieve a result that solves the constituent's problem. Additionally, other variables could affect casework outcomes (such as the responsiveness of various federal agencies). Casework feedback can be quite valuable, especially in collecting individual stories of ways the Member and the office had a positive impact on a constituent's life. So, collecting data is very important, but may not fit into the same kind of data collection processes as other work done by the office.
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