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An Ounce of Prevention: How Predictable Disasters Redefine Quality Healthcare 

Elizabeth Goodman and Kristine Nixon

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In recent months you may have heard about the ISG Measuring Customer Satisfaction Initiative and wondered what our team is up to. Here we’ve answered some common questions about the work, how to get involved, and everything you should know to be looped in. 

What is CSAT? 

Customer satisfaction refers to initiatives that allow an organization to gather feedback from its customers about how well it is delivering its products and services and how it might improve delivery. Customer research methods allow us to answer a wide range of questions to better serve our customers. We often prioritize research methods that answer specific and immediate questions for our projects at hand. How much time do users spend on a critical task? Do customers understand our instructions? Though, questions that yield insights for the totality of the customer experience (CX), such as customer satisfaction questions, help us to strategically inform project planning and prioritization across the enterprise. 

While customer satisfaction as an idea is a general one, CSAT is more defined and refers to a particular type of customer feedback survey. CSAT surveys allow customers to assess and provide feedback, both quantitative and qualitative, on customer service and product quality. 

CSAT surveys are an ‘always on’ method of continuous data collection that allow us to measure aspects of the CX. These surveys typically provide insights related to: 

• Overall customer satisfaction 
• Ease of use 
• Efficiency 
• Open-ended, qualitative feedback 

Most commonly, CSAT surveys are delivered to customers via email or in the context of a user interface, with a site intercept survey tool/form. The latter has many benefits, most importantly that customers can answer questions while immersed in the experience when it is most fresh in their minds. 

Measuring the CX with a CSAT survey is an excellent step toward continuous improvement, but it’s what we do with the insights to drive and improve the experience that really counts. For this reason, it’s crucial to have a process in place for making sense of data, especially open-ended, qualitative feedback. 

What You Need to Know About the Initiative 

The goal of the ISG Measuring Customer Satisfaction Initiative, simply put, is to create a consistent and repeatable external customer feedback loop across ADOs and ISG-supported information systems, allowing teams to measure the CX and efficiently improve these experiences based on these new customer data points. 

Our benefit hypothesis is that obtaining CSAT data will result in: 

• Consistently tracked customer satisfaction and opportunities for improvement 
• Ability to provide consistent, recurring framework for reporting and objective-setting from ADOs on research and design 
• Business cost and time savings by reducing mistakes and need for rework  
• Quantitative indicators of how HCD adoption leads to improved customer satisfaction 
• CMS/ISG alignment with other agencies to improve the public’s trust in federal government  

Our focus is to create customer feedback loops across external-facing ISG systems via site intercept surveys. We are specifically addressing external-facing systems for the first phase of this work and hope to also expand this work to internal-facing systems in the near future. The site intercept survey tools we’ve prioritized for this work include Survey Monkey, an enterprise solution, and Touchpoints, a GSA developed tool for government agencies. 

How We Can Help 

The HCD Center of Excellence is here to support you as you participate in the initiative. We can partner with you through key tasks, such as: 

• Establish and test a site intercept survey tool
• Determine questions for satisfaction, ease of use, and efficiency
• Define a statistically relevant sample for continuous data collection
• Resolve PRA coverage and Information Collection Request (ICR) for site intercept survey
• Complete and submit Third Party Website and Applications (TPWA) form for the site intercept tool
• Determine approach for survey display 

Next Steps 

As we partner with teams across ISG to accomplish this work, we also plan to share our progress through case studies and lunch ‘n’ learns. If you have any questions about CSAT surveys, the ISG Customer Satisfaction Initiative, or would like to be added to our email distribution, please contact us at hcd@cms.hhs.gov. We look forward to working together and keeping you looped in to this work.