BG (NS) Yam Ah Mee, Deputy Chairman of the Quality Service Committee and Chief Executive of the Land Transport Authority, talks about the vision of round-the-clock, one-stop integrated Public Service.

Public Service Standards

We would like the Singapore Public Service to be just one integrated Public Service. For example, whether you are staying at the Ritz-Carlton or interacting with Singapore Airlines (SIA), you deal with each of them as one organisation. Take SIA. You get the same quality service whether you deal with SIA in London, Frankfurt or Beijing.

The Singapore Public Service should be like that. Regardless of the many ministries, organs of state and statutory boards, when a member of the public interacts with the Singapore Public Service, he wants to see it as one integrated organisation, providing consistently good service that is at least equal to or surpasses the minimum service baseline.

The challenge

The Singapore Public Service is 120,000 strong, with about 60,000 people in the ministries and organs of state, and about 60,000 in statutory boards.

When we compare ourselves with big organisations, for example, with IBM or HP, we find that they have staff numbering hundreds of thousands. The organisations comprise different parts, and they operate globally in very different environments where expectations are different. Yet they operate as one integrated organisation.

I think that is even more challenging compared to our 120,000 staff who are mainly based in Singapore. No doubt the different Public Service agencies have different missions, but they all go back to the same thing - to ensure the success of Singapore and to provide good service to the public.

So how do we consistently provide good service? For a start, the goal must be there, and the belief that it can be done.

People, ethos and enablers

We emphasise three key things - the people; the ethos and values; and the enablers.

People are key. We need good leaders who feel passionate about service, and we need to recruit, retain and develop good people at all the different levels, whether they are working at the front-end or at the back-end handling policy matters.

Our people must also have the right ethos and values. We need to deliver service with integrity and excellence. Members of the public must feel that they will be heard and that people will follow up on their requests or feedback promptly and with integrity.

Then there are the enablers. Having brought in good people, we need to develop and train them. Over the last two years, we have also focused on service standards across the Public Service and a quality-service training framework which emphasises working as one integrated Public Service, so as to provide our Public Service officers with the customer service skills that they need.

Push and pull factors

Instead of just telling people about the importance of good service, or punishing them if they do not deliver good service, we prefer pull factors - awards like the Star Service Awards which acknowledges the contributions of the staff and recognises people who have made the effort to deliver good service. The awards are our opportunity to show appreciation to the individual and the organisation. By doing so, we motivate our people. But it's not just about us and the staff; it also sends a message to the public that we value the ethos and passion surrounding good service.

There are also push factors. We have relative benchmarks to show how the different agencies compare with each other, and we also conduct mystery service audit checks. All these measures aim to encourage our people to move in the right direction.

Basic tenets

We have to keep people informed and address issues promptly. Acknowledgement of public requests and feedback is important. People are sometimes not unhappy that our answer is "no", but how the "no" is conveyed. There must be acknowledgement so that people know that their feedback is being taken seriously. And we must give them sufficient background information. If the answer is "no", we have to explain the reason clearly. It is important to engage people so that they feel their feedback is being heard and given fair consideration.

Dealing with difficult customers

We do get customers who can be quite unreasonable, or may have just gotten up on the wrong side of bed that day. When it comes to such interactions, we need to support our staff by giving them clear guidelines. They have to look not just at the words in the guidelines but also at the spirit behind the words. They have to be clear about the policy and the rationale behind it, and have the right ethos and training to handle the situation.

Another litmus test is this - if we show a letter of explanation to a third party, will they consider it to be fair? We do ask our staff to take the time to craft careful replies, and we also train our counter staff to ensure that their explanations are reasonable.

The changing face of service

The Singapore Public Service has been moving from front-line counters to electronic counters. At LTA for example, we get an average of 135,000 calls on 1800-CALL LTA daily. With the move towards e-services and the launch of our Eservices@OneMotoring portal, we are now getting 60,000 transactions a day, or 20 million a year.

1 government, 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I remember these numbers well. That's our goal as we move beyond counter services to e-services and mobile services. With the addition of mobile services, members of the public will be able to access information in an integrated fashion and hopefully anytime, anywhere, most of the time.

One-stop

Integration is key. Whether you're dealing with organisations A, B or C, and no matter how many organisations are involved behind the scenes, what we would like to achieve is to have all the agencies work together: to be seen as one and to act as one, so that members of the public do not get the sense of being shoved from one door to another door.

Public perceptions

We have a good Public Service. As Singaporeans travel more and interact with foreign public service agencies such as the customs, airport officials, and port authorities, they find that by and large, their experience in Singapore is good. In fact, the feedback is not so much that the Public Service is not good, but that we want it to be the best that all Singaporeans deserve.