Mobile feedback in the Philippines

Sunday, 5 February 2012

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In the Philippines up to 150 million text messages are sent each day. By contrast there are only 3.2 million internet users in the country. So when the Civil Service Commission examined creating new channels for citizen feedback, it realised that the wireless channel was the way to go.

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FEATURE

By its own admission, ‘TXT CSC’ – the SMS-based service of the Philippines Civil Service Commission (CSC) – is an effort to “provide citizens with a weapon, a tool to pressure government agencies into examining their systems and procedures towards faster and more efficient delivery of services”.

In an effort to improve service levels in the bureaucracy, the CSC launched a programme called Mamamayan Muna (‘Citizens First’) to receive complaints, to respond to queries, and to provide assistance for citizens who are dealing with the bureaucracy.

From the start electronic channels were available for citizens to send in queries or lodge complaints. But with a national internet penetration of 4.2 per cent, the email service and the feedback web site were hardly used. A telephone hotline, while useful, operated only on weekdays and only until 5pm. But with one of the largest volumes of SMS messaging, or ‘texting’, in Asia the CSC decided to experiment with a wireless channel to try and reinvigorate its flagging citizen feedback efforts.

Best laid plans The ‘TXT CSC’ initiative not only opened up a new communication channel between citizens and government – it also added a degree of immediacy to the feedback process. This was an important element from the outset because the CSC regarded citizen feedback as a useful means to catch unsanctioned behaviour on the part of civil servants.

Initial plans to respond to SMS complaints by sending staff immediately to the point of friction proved to be overambitious in the absence of a supporting scheduling and field service management infrastructure. Nevertheless, the feedback channel has served to improve civil governance.

Citizen usage charges TXT CSC is run in-house on a limited budget, with an equivalent of one full-time staff member using one PC with a database. A message sent to TXT CSC costs citizens P$1.00 (US$0.02). This is much lower than the P$2.50 charged by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) for citizens to participate in its m-government scheme. Part of the reason for this lower cost is that CSC is not using a fee-sharing arrangement with an application service provider or cellular service provider, as the BIR is.

CSC resisted suggestions from the cellular service provider to adopt a fee-sharing arrangement as they did not believe the TXT CSC service would generate enough traffic to make fee-sharing work. They also wanted the lowest possible price for the service. The Commission also found the menu-driven system being proposed by the service provider to be too complicated, and believed that users would quickly become frustrated if they had to spend time navigating through menus.

Since the launch, and in spite of minimal public announcements and promotions, TXT CSC is receiving an average of 1500 messages a month, which rates as amongst the highest of the government’s various SMS-based information and complaint services.

Because the CSC believes that citizens do not want to receive templated responses, all responses to citizen text messages are personalised to the complaint or query. As a matter of policy the CSC aims to respond to all queries and complaints the same day.

The Commission is generally able to respond quickly to queries and complaints about other agencies because of pre-existing relationships with these various agencies. It also helps that CSC has supervisory power over all government employees. Nonetheless, CSC is not always able to meet the one-day deadline because of the complexities of interacting with other agencies, and its response time could be better if it had online access to other public agencies

While it has not yet achieved its goal of becoming a weapon for citizens to confront impersonal and inefficient bureaucratic behaviour, TXT CSC has proven itself to be an interesting and inexpensive trial of technology and user attitudes. M-government systems, if properly supported, can play a practical role in Asia – and some Asian citizens seem willing to pay for preferential access to a civil service complaints service.

Future plans The CSC has recently reconceived the role of TXT CSC. In addition to its current remit, the service will also be used to support the Public Service Delivery Audit – a programme, in partnership with the Association of Schools of Public Administration, which will rate government frontline services on a systematic basis.

Using SMS ratings submitted by citizens, agencies will be categorised. Agencies determined to be delivering good services will be commended. Those that fail the test will be assisted to improve their service delivery.

The hope is that even with the current relatively low usage rates, the creation of a pan-civil service performance ranking, based on citizen feedback, will complement the original aims of TXT CSC.