Canada 3-1-1 Satisfaction

Assessing Municipal 3-1-1 Citizen Service Centres

What do citizens say about your municipality's 3-1-1 services?

3-1-1 Service Centres are at the forefront of public service delivery. Intended to act as a one-stop-shop for municipal information, these centres aim to deliver a consistent level of customer service, regardless of the type of inquiry being made.

The question many municipalities are now struggling with is how to obtain solid and actionable metrics that will allow them to evaluate the success of their 3-1-1 Citizen Service Centre, including how their centre measures up against those found in other municipalities. Without this information, municipalities are unable to accurately assess how well their 3-1-1 Citizen Service Centre is meeting the community's expectations and what, if any, improvements are necessary.

To accommodate this need, Ipsos Reid is pleased to provide a specialized research program for City Administrators, Council, and other stakeholders to measure operational performance and service delivery of 3-1-1 Citizen Service Centres. This study will not only evaluate overall performance of your 3-1-1 centre, but will also provide normative comparisons to other local governments that will shed light on how well you are doing compared to industry standards.

What's covered?

This survey measures critical elements of municipal 3-1-1 Citizen Service Centers, including:

Overall perceptions about the value of 3-1-1;
Overall impression of citizens' customer service experience;
Evaluation of 3-1-1 customer service representatives including knowledge, courteousness, helpfulness, and accuracy in responding to citizen concerns;
Satisfaction with overall service delivery; and,
Awareness of 3-1-1 related communications.

How does your local government's 3-1-1 Citizen Service Center compare to others?

Ipsos Reid believes that in addition to understanding how well your municipality's 3-1-1 Citizen Service Centre is doing overall, an equally important measure is learning how your service compares to industry standards. As part of the deliverables for participating in this research program, we will compare your municipality's individual results to aggregate data of all other participating local governments. This includes creating a Satisfaction Index that lets you see how your citizens' satisfaction levels compare to those living elsewhere. Overall, these comparisons will provide valuable context, added insight, greater depth of analysis, and benchmarks against which to evaluate your performance.

How does the survey work?

Municipalities may sign up for a subscription for two or four reports per year. The telephone survey will be fielded every quarter to 300 citizens of each participating municipality. Respondents will be aged 18 years and older and must have accessed their municipality's 3-1-1 centre within the past 90 days.

The margin of error on a survey of this size is ±5.7% (19 times out of 20) and the survey is large enough to allow the results to be analyzed according to key variables.

To ensure we are speaking with people who have contacted your municipality's 3-1-1 Citizen Service Centre, participating municipalities will be responsible for providing Ipsos Reid with a complete list of all citizens who contacted their centre each quarter. To facilitate this process, Ipsos Reid will provide municipalities with a statement to be included at the end of each 3-1-1 call asking citizens if they would be willing to participate in follow-up research regarding their satisfaction with their 3-1-1 experience. Only those agreeing to this would be included in the survey sample. Ipsos Reid will then randomly contact these individuals to participate in the survey. Advance lead time is required to generate sample. Please call us for more information.

To keep costs low, the same core questions will be asked in all municipalities. However, municipalities can add custom questions or increase the number of interviews for an additional charge. Your individual results will not be shared with other municipalities.

Deliverables

Each participating municipality will receive a quarterly or semiannual report of their individual results, along with aggregate data from other participating municipalities for additional insight, context, and benchmarks. In addition, each report will also include tracking information from past quarters to understand if and how service experiences are changing from quarter to quarter.

The quarterly deliverables will include:

Detailed tables with crosstabulations of the major demographics such as type of contact with 3-1-1, age, gender, length of residence, and families with children under 18.
PowerPoint slides of your results.

At the end of the calendar year, Ipsos Reid will also provide an Annual Report to each municipality summarizing results for the previous year's field period. Furthermore, up to two in person presentations can be made to an audience of your choice (travel will be billed extra).

Cost and Timing

The 3-1-1 Satisfaction Syndicated Study is affordably priced at $34,000 annually (one report per quarter) or $19,500 semiannually (two reports within a one year period

Custom questions specific to your municipality will cost $950 per closed-ended question and $1,600 per open-ended question. Increasing the sample size costs $22 per additional interview.

The study will field once per quarter at the end of September, December, March and June. Advance commitment is required to generate an opt-in sample of citizens who have used your 3-1-1 service. Please call for details.