Interview: Nathaniel Ford, Part Seven

We are setting up measurable timelines for responses, so if one comes into my office, you know, that if it’s phone, or if it’s major, it gets gets triaged in some kind of way. But the idea is, within a certain timeframe, you’re going to get an answer back, and we’re going to measure our compliance with that. We’re going to measure our compliance with concerns that come from the Mayor’s Office or concerns that come in our Customer Service area.

Right now there are no clear measurements or kind of documentation on managing that. Now, why did this start? I guess a week or so ago, and this was something that I wanted to examine at some point to see how responsive we were to customers, but I got acutely aware of it last week when I received a complaint – I received an investigation from a complaint, and we developed a letter to send out when we looked at the complaint and wanted to look at it further. I noticed that it was almost a month old. That is entirely way too long to respond to a customer’s concern that comes to my office, so we’re looking at cutting that in half, and then eventually cutting that in half again, but we’re on top of that and we recognize that people want something timely, and –

EB: And they want a response.

NF: I guess, and I get some, you know, by e-mail, and in those cases I may not have the answer right then and there, but I’ve responded at midnight on a Saturday night or a Sunday night, depending on – you know, I look at my Blackberry, I see - I can’t do that all the time – but sometimes if I get an issue, immediately I’ll get back to the customer and say, look, you know, I’ll take personally, we’re taking a look into this and that, you know, I’ll forward it to the appropriate department. They get a response from me and off I e-mail to get a response and get it cleared up, so I take that very seriously in terms of customer correspondence and clearing that up.

Maggie Lynch (Media and PR Director, Executive Director's Office): I think the one thing that unfortunately people want but that we can’t do, is they want to know what happened to, if it was an employee who behaved inappropriately, they want to know, and the law doesn’t let us do that.

EB: Well, sure, it's an HR issue!

ML: But you’d be surprised how many people, they want to know what happened to somebody, and we legally can’t tell you. We can tell you, well, we’ll take the appropriate action, but we can’t –

NF: Yeah, we’ve identified the individual, the operator who’s been involved, and appropriate corrective actions will be taken to insure that that situation will not occur again.

But we take those seriously. We keep records on them, and again, I think there are two parts to it. One, getting the information, getting the feedback to our customer about what we’re doing about it, and then actually taking actions to correct behavior or improve that situation. So, I don’t know if there’s enough I can say about that, other than it’s – you know, we’re here to serve the customers.

And I mean, we are here to serve the riders, and I mean, I’m very clear on that, and I think the staff is very clear on that. That is my vision, that we’re here to provide you with good service, and we, dare I say, will never be good enough. We’ll keep working on it and keep working on new opportunities to improve it. I’ve been doing this for 20+ years, and I don’t do it just as a job or just as something because I have to earn a salary.

do it because I think it really has an impact on the quality of life for, you know, people that use our system to get to work, to get an education, to go see a doctor, so our role is not like “Oh, I’ve got to be careful,” but our role is not a utilitarian type service. Our role is really to make sure we enhance the quality of life for the people in the City of San Francisco, and that’s my vision, and that’s my objective. And this is a challenging city.

I would not have taken this opportunity if I didn’t think it was possible. And it is possible. We’ve got some good people here. We’ve got some challenges. We’ve got some issues. They didn’t show up overnight, we won’t resolve them overnight. But those that we can resolve overnight, and those that we can resolve over the next months and years, we’re going to be on top of them. We have an idea of what our problems are, and over time, as you come back and check in with me, I’ll show you the progress we’ve made.

Tomorrow: FastPass, tokens, cash: so many ways to pay to ride Muni! What's the plan?