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To Prod and to Serve; Williams's Aide Leads Effort to Improve City's Phone
Manners, Response Times
[FINAL Edition]
The Washington Post - Washington, D.C.
Author: Steve Twomey
Date: Jun 18, 2001
Start Page: A.01
Section: A SECTION
Text Word Count: 1450
Around a battleship of an oval table, the mayor's Cabinet is listening hard, like school kids under
a teacher's spell. Lisa Morgan is the teacher. The public wants its calls returned, she tells the
chieftains of District government. Let's get back to them in two days. Let's use nice voice-mail
greetings. Make sure your workers adopt these sensibilities, too.
One more thing: "The testers are going to start August 1st," Morgan says.
She means the contract spies she employs to dial up departments and pose as citizens to see
which agencies are naughty and which are nice, service-wise. She then regularly posts a list to,
well, encourage the bottom dwellers.
"This is the big heads-up," Morgan tells the Cabinet. On paper, Anthony A. Williams is the man
hired 29 months ago to lead a government renowned for rude, slow and chaotic ways toward
loving care of its underwriters, Washington's taxpayers. But in practice, a young woman with
Chicago roots, a master's degree in public administration and a fetish for fixing was given the
Augean task of coordinating a purge of not-my-problem attitudes and hold- button reflexes.
That emphasis places the District -- oft-chided for lagging behind most curves -- within an
apparently budding movement among governments to treat constituents with the same
earnestness and efficiency with which businesses aspire to treat customers.
"I would say what they're doing puts them in a leading role," says Leif Ulstrup, a vice president
of American Management Systems, a Fairfax County business and information technology
consulting firm that has worked with hundreds of governments.
How well Morgan does as director of customer service operations could determine her boss's
reelection fate next year, because Williams offered himself as government's repairman after four
terms of Marion Barry, spliced with one of Sharon Pratt Kelly. And while schools and violence
are more cosmic concerns, nothing is more noticeable to voters than how their city treats them

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on the phone or at a counter and how well it delivers the mundane services they seek and
solves the problems they have.
Customer service, Williams says, is "an ongoing, real-time test of whether we can get this
government to move in a new direction." Or, as Morgan says, "Customer service is the game."
So how fares the crusade for front-line excellence? "We thought, 'Boom, it could happen in a
year,' " she says. "It didn't. . . . The problems are more complicated than we thought."
Morgan, 37, has been at it ever since Williams enlisted her personally and ever since she
thought, "Yeah! Won't that be fun!" She agreed, though, because "I like building something that
makes it work, that makes sense, that's a little more logical."
Quick to credit the city's agencies for helping, she's been trying to enforce phone guidelines
("No food or gum while talking with constituent"; "Convey sympathy, professional courtesy and a
pleasant attitude"; "Check back with customer frequently when on hold"). She runs a one-
number call center (202-727-1000, two dozen operators standing by) where constituents can
unload questions, complaints or demands for service without enduring telephonic ping-ponging.
She's working with departments to track service demands so that when a citizen reports an
abandoned car, a pitted street or a tree draped across a sidewalk, the tip is handled quickly, not
buried eternally. Her testers have made thousands of calls. She has charts upon charts and
knows precisely how many calls come to the call center (65,652 in May) and any agency's latest
total performance ranking (Department of Motor Vehicles: next to last).
And she oversaw an audacious campaign that Williams launched: By December, 80 percent of
all agencies had to rate as good or better in four categories: courtesy, knowledge, etiquette and
overall. Some came close or reached the goal in one area or another, but here's how many of
41 departments were rated good or better in all four: Three.
Nobody said this would be a boardwalk stroll. "I can't just stand up on a balcony and proclaim
like Eva Peron, 'Okay, everybody, we're going to have better service,' " says Williams, a
Democrat. But things have improved a lot, he says. The secret-call results say that, too. So
does D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2).
"I can only express that it's so much better than it was," says Evans, who ran against Williams.
But the number of residents calling his office for help navigating the city maze "is still higher
than it should be."
Even so, Purdue University researcher Jon Anton is impressed when told that the District has a
call center and uses tracking numbers. "Oh, God! You've got a great story to tell! Local
government just hasn't had that level of sophistication."

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Anton, who studies private and public call centers and did a study of government call centers for
AMS of Fairfax, says he'd like to come to Washington to see for himself. "That's fascinating.
D.C. has a call center?!"
Neither of the two largest suburban counties -- Fairfax and Montgomery -- has one quite like it,
but officials of both, as well as of Prince George's County, say they stress service and quality
control. Doing so would seem to be good politics no matter what the jurisdiction, but traditionally
many governments have been belittled for lax ways. Having no competition and thus no fears of
going belly- up, they haven't faced the same pressure to impress customers that the private
sector has.
John A. Koskinen, Williams's city administrator, says that if government leaders don't make
constituent care a priority, public employees "can sort of say, 'Well, what are they going to do to
me?' "
Within the District's bureaucracy, officials say, there had not been enough training. Workers
didn't take responsibility for solving problems. Technology -- push-button phones, for example --
was slow in coming. A surliness set in: "There are people who have spoken to constituents in a
way I completely cannot understand," Morgan says, although she adds that coping with
residents who are often rude themselves can be tough.
A Washington Post poll in 1996 found that only 35 percent of residents sampled thought Barry
was doing a good or an excellent job of improving city services. In a Post poll in February 2000,
residents said that except for poor schools and crime, no problem needed more attention than
services.
Barry, who governed the city for all but four of the 20 years before Williams, did not respond to
two phone messages. But others familiar with his administrations say it is not fair to suggest
customer service was not a concern or that improvements were not made. But efforts were
hampered, they say, by the District's staggering financial problems.
Not long after his inauguration in 1999, Williams hired Morgan to help with the operation of his
office. Thoughtful and stylish, she had worked for him when he was the District's chief financial
officer, and Williams says she is "a real can-do person."
Among her duties in the mayor's office was handling queries and service demands made
directly to Williams, and she was surprised to find no system for collecting data about them, she
says. There was no way to know how many people called the mayor, what they called about or
what was done about the calls. Her order: "Log the calls! Log the calls!"
By September, Williams wanted Morgan to oversee customer service throughout the
government. On their own, departments had been working to improve, Morgan says, and her
job is not to run those efforts but to be "the evangelist for the whole thing."

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Leslie A. Hotaling, who has worked for D.C. government for 23 years and is now director of the
Department of Public Works, says the difference between Williams and his predecessors is
Morgan's secret- call evaluations, which let agencies know how they are doing.
But unless recycling bins that have been requested show up, auto tags are swiftly conveyed and
streets are swept as scheduled, all the tests, data and good phone manners will matter little.
Willie J. Lynch Jr., executive assistant to council member Kevin P. Chavous (D- Ward 7), says
the administration still labors to get beyond cosmetic changes.
"They're nicer; you get a [tracking] number, but the tree still doesn't get trimmed," Lynch says.
Yet last month, AMS's Ulstrup, who lives in the city, says he called to report potholes and "within
two hours" he got an e-mail reply and a tracking number. It still took nearly three weeks to fill the
holes, and he was never given a time when it would be done, which would have eased his mind.
Still: "I was very encouraged."
Morgan is too, when she checks her charts. "Thank God, for me, that the scores are creeping
up."