Andrea DiMaio

Over the last several years, when pitching on e-government or – more recently – government 2.0, I have been highlighting that citizen satisfaction depend on demonstrable improvement of service levels, as well as their expectations about service levels.

I have been living in Brussels, Belgium for a few years in the nineties and I can say that the service levels I got from what used to be my Belgian bank at the time (long acquired since) were better than the ones I get from my bank in Italy today, more than 15 years later.

Equally, I still remember the kindness and professionalism of staff at the Belgian revenue office, who welcomed me into a nice office, and spent time with me – I was not very fluent in French at the time – to explain all the procedures I had to follow as an expatriate, such as importing a car or buying some VAT-free goods as a European Commission’s official. My recent experience with a tax office in Italy, although improved with respect to many years ago, is still way below that.

The bottom line is that if your expectations about service levels are low , you are not going to be disappointed. The lesson I learned today is that they are never low enough.

My experience concerns a primary public service provider in Italy (no name no shame), which happens to have a pretty good reputation for the effective use of technology. A few days ago it occurred to me that I had never received a reply to a complaint I had submitted more than three years ago for an excess charge on a service they had provided (or, more precisely, intermediated). I went to the closest local branch office and I submitted a complaint (paper) form with all required evidence . After a few months the branch was closed, then I moved (although in the same area) and totally forgot about this.

Last Monday, as I was preparing a presentation on government 2.0 for an event, I found a copy of my complaint under a pile of paper and decided to try the on-line services on their flashy web site. It took some time to find the right link to then fill a form with my complaint code and detail. On Friday morning I got an email from them with my complaint code in the subject line and and invitation to open the (Microsoft Word) attachment. I opened the attachment with trepidation , which soon turned into disappointment when I read a very brief text:

Answer Description

Dear Client, with reference to your request , please cntact us at the following phone number ……(Mon-Sat 8am-8pm)

Best Regards

I called the number and found the usual automatic voice response system providing lots of options about things to do (various services, commercial information, etc) but nothing about complaints. I typed “zero” and “hash” a few times until when the automatic voice informed me I would be connected to the “first available operator”. Well, I’m sure you guess what happened next: I was kept on hold forever and nobody picked the phone.

So, what’s the point of developing a flashy web site and pretty advanced online services if one can’t even stick to the basics of decent customer care?

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