Ontario
Public Service

Improving Customer Service

The Ontario Public Service set out to increase customer satisfaction.
We contributed to business process improvement efforts to decrease the average turn-around time for answering letters from the public. The work resulted in a four-fold reduction from I47 days to 11 days, beating the customer service requirement of 15 days.

01

Challenge:

Ensuring standardized performance expectations across many service providers can be difficult. The Province of Ontario challenged its internal processes to ensure Ontarians seeking engagement and information from the government would receive a timely response within 15 days. The government ministry in question was averaging a turn-around response time of 47 days.

02

Solution:

We were embedded within the Ministerial team responsible for receiving and replying to public inquiries, enabling us to map the workflow as it was in its current state in order to understand how things were working. Together, the entire team designed a future state process that focused attention on the areas in the current state that were creating bottlenecks and keeping the process stuck.

We worked extensively with the team to create a process that would handle the bulk of the inquiries in one stream-lined path, while enabling off-shoot processes for more complicated matters. This enabled the process to be efficient with the routine items, while increasing effectiveness for those inquires requiring more fulsome consideration and response without burdening the general process.

03

Results:

The Ministerial team achieved an average turn-around time of 11-days, surpassing the government standard by four days. Additionally, the engagement of the whole team throughout the reengineering process allowed for critical discussions and total team engagement and ownership of the new process.

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