KINGSTON, Jamaica (JIS) — Amidst complaints about less-than-desirable public-service delivery, the Government of Jamaica is pushing ahead to achieve world-class customer service through the more than 200 public-sector institutions islandwide.

This is consistent with one of the Vision 2030 Jamaica — National Development Plan goals, which commits the Administration to “foster world-class customer service and professionalism in all public institutions and to create mechanisms for efficient and effective delivery of services”.

Since April 2017, the Public Sector Transformation and Modernisation Division (PSTMD), which was created to streamline activities aimed at boosting government efficiency, has been engaging technocrats in the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), civil society and other groups at service excellence visioning workshops. 

These engagements form part of the Public Sector Modernisation Programme and are in line with the Administration’s undertaking to develop a Service Excellence Policy that outlines the core principles, values, standards, strategies and accountability mechanism that will promote and institutionalise service excellence to facilitate consistency in service quality.

The purpose of the workshops, in which the wider public will also be engaged, is to establish a clear definition of service excellence and identify the underlying principles, values and standards that should drive the framework underpinning this across Government.

Director General of the PSTMD, situated in the Office of the Cabinet, Veniece Pottinger-Scott, told JIS News that the workshops are part of the wider transformation and modernisation agenda, aimed at establishing a culture of service excellence across the public sector, especially in the MDAs, which have a duty to provide services of the highest standard to internal and external clients.

 “It is an imperative. Without it, things are not going to improve at the rate anticipated in terms of growth and economic development over time. The public service workers’ image, for the most part, is nowhere near where we want it to be. It’s somewhat negative, and we think that it is very critical that that image be improved,” she said.

The Director General said the objective is to create an overarching framework that sets out how customer service improvement should be undertaken in the public sector.

‘Part of what we are doing is to start the visioning process of what that ought to look like by way of shaping the elements that must comprise a policy,” she informed.

Pottinger-Scott indicated that a survey of the status of customer service in the public sector was done to provide a baseline for future evaluation of the policy and to establish the status of customer service across the public sector, and specific issues to be addressed.

This survey was done by a consulting firm, Hurwich, and overseen by a steering committee comprising representatives nominated by Permanent Secretaries and Heads of Agencies.  It also provided both quantitative and qualitative snapshots of service experience in seven high-impact areas of Government, namely health, business facilitation, revenue collection, security, justice, agriculture and social security.

Some of the issues raised by clients included insufficient signage and poor accommodation at facilities, long waiting times and systems being too paper-based, limited facilities for the disabled, and lack of simple communication and transactional web services for customers.

Pottinger-Scott said public-sector workers interviewed during the assessment acknowledged the need for change in the culture of service and indicated their willingness to work to this end.

The Cabinet Office will also be working with MDAs to improve weaknesses identified during the assessment.

Over the years, a number of entities have gone the extra mile to improve the customer experience by reducing the waiting time to access services.

Among these are the National Health Fund (NHF); National Housing Trust (NHT); Administrator General’s Department (AGD); Passport, Immigration and Citizenship Agency (PICA) and the Registrar General’s Department (RGD).

Principal Director of the Modernisation Programme Implementation Unit, Wayne Robertson, acknowledged that services offered by some agencies are at a higher level than others, noting that some entities are using technology to facilitate the ease with which customers’ transactions are conducted.

 “But it needs to go wider than what we currently have. We need to get to a stage where all service providers are providing online solutions and are fully sensitising customers around various options,” he added.