What would you do if your employees received poor customer service ratings?

A 2004 citizen survey revealed that only 43 percent of Salisbury’s residents believed city employees were courteous. For a local government trying to promote a business-friendly environment and create new economic opportunities, this was a major red flag.

City Manager David Treme decided it was time to fundamentally transform the organizational culture and initiated a customer service intervention.

Treme, as part of his ongoing commitment to professional development through the ICMA credentialing program, learned about the hedgehog principle in Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great.

In the book, Collins compares the fox with the hedgehog. The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox spends its day figuring out how to attack the hedgehog in various cunning ways; the hedgehog remains safe because it knows that it is better than anyone else at one thing: curling up into a ball of spikes.

Collins’s point is to show how some organizations are able to simplify a complex environment into a single idea, which then becomes the linchpin of its culture and operation.

Treme had his management team read Good to Great. Employees began to focus on customer service as Salisbury’s linchpin. Building on feedback from their employee meetings and focus group findings, the city manager and his leadership team adopted customer service as the one unifying concept across all departments.

Next, the city hired a facilitator to guide the organization through an intervention to educate employees on customer service and foster their sense of ownership.

The city then adopted a new motto—”Salisbury is driven to serve”—and incorporated customer service as one of the its six core values. Each department integrated the customer service model into its service delivery areas, even including the hiring and evaluation processes.

The process of changing the organizational culture took a few years and is an ongoing effort. But the city’s efforts are paying off. When Treme conducted another citizen survey in 2009, 68 percent of respondents felt that city employees were courteous, a 25 percent improvement.