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The Customer is Always Right
This look at public transit in Toronto appeared in the business section (no less) of the Toronto Star. It is full of free advice for the TTC in how to improve customer service in the monopoly it enjoys. For those of you outside of Toronto, the Toronto Transit Commission has seen sleeping ticket-takers and overall eroding quality and service. An advisory panel has just released report that says the TTC will go off the rails unless it "creates a culture of customer service." The article writer asks, "But what exactly is a customer service culture? And how can a monopoly with a captive market turn itself into an empathetic organization that delights its customers?"
SQE has been asking the same of public education for decades. The answer is to challenge the monopoly. SQE has many solutions for school choice that readers can find out about here, here, and here.
“These questions concern not only the TTC, but other companies that once enjoyed a stranglehold in their sectors – such as Bell Canada in phones, Rogers in cable TV, Enbridge in supplying gas and Direct Energy in renting water heaters and selling furnace protection plans.
I get more complaints from readers about their dealings with these companies than any others, and it’s no coincidence that they once had near-monopoly status.”
As for public services, such as education, they have never been a culture of customer service, delighting each and every parent. It could explain, why school boards often leave the voice mail, as their route to avoid speaking to real parents and their problems, and where many of the problems are caused by the school, board, and ministry policies.
As the third article link, titled, “How Can Accountability Be Increased? “, states: “Over the course of the last 35 years or so, public education has become less and less accountable to the public. While per-student spending (in constant dollars) was doubling, school boards’ financial statements were becoming murkier. While parents’ interest in their children’s education was growing, the schools were getting less welcoming. While the community was asking more and more questions about the quality of the students’ education, the school boards getting better at obscuring the data.
This pattern was repeated over and over again all around the province. Turned loose to run the show with a seemingly-endless flow of money, most boards put up expensive buildings, wrote non-demanding job descriptions, hired hundreds of employees and fended off any challenges to their comfortable existence. They even convinced themselves that they were doing all this for the sake of the students, thereby permitting themselves to become self-righteous about and at variance with politicians’ attempts to get control of spending.
Thirty years of carte blanche power has allowed educators to dig very deep trenches and establish strong bulwarks against change. It is going to be hard to reform the educational bureaucracy now, given the well-funded, powerful teachers’ unions and school boards that want to protect the status quo. Because most educators are going to resist genuine accountability, it will not be enough just to introduce standards and testing. American public schools, for example, are tested frequently, but the U.S. schools still have most of the same problems as the Ontario schools.”
In this type of climate, servicing their customers is the last thing the educrats want or desire to have. It would mean, that allowing and acting on feedback is key to improving customer service, as the Toronto Star article states, but it would also mean improved education policies on the needs of the people they serve.