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Good Enough or.... Excellent

What makes a poor customer service experience stand out? It is easy to think of that inattentive waiter, being forced to listen to terrible hold music for an hour, or even a cashier that was rude for no reason at all. But what about all of the times you experienced excellent customer service? What made the experience go from good to great? Was it an employee going out of their way to accommodate you? Maybe someone following up with you multiple times? Or was it as simple as someone that seemed to genuinely care if you had everything you needed.

These scenarios all have something in common: they involved someone making you, the customer, a priority. As often as we experience customer service during our daily lives at restaurants, banks and grocery stores, it is easy to forget how often we provide customer service in other areas of our life. When you think of the last few times you provided customer service was it excellent, pretty good, or just good enough? Did you go the extra mile or even the extra foot? Did you leave your customer feeling as though you truly cared and they were a priority or did you go through the motions? Providing excellent customer service when working with offenders can be especially difficult. The drudgery of paperwork and many compliance tasks along with the sheer volume of clients most criminal justice employees interact with daily can be a recipe for “poor” customer service experiences.

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Managing with "PEOPLE"

“Life is like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you are going to get.”  While it would be a stretch to consider Forrest Gump a management consultant, I have discovered this bit of wisdom applies to offender and employee management.

I’ve found that because both staff and clients have the whole “being a human” thing in common, the relationship style, strategy and techniques that are helpful with offender management are also effective with staff management.   Of course, we have to adjust our management style to connect and manage different types of personalities. I’ve found that using the PEOPLE method has helped me in my management efforts:

• Personable

• Empathetic

• Objective

• Professional

• Lead

• Example 

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A Shift in Thinking in Community Corrections

I turned 54 when I started writing this post.  So... I’m “old” (at least that is what my four kids tell me).  Another birthday simply means I have personally experienced many shifts in business and information technology in the past half century including but not limited to the following: 

• Mainframes taking whole floors of buildings to networked devices that practically disappear into our surroundings

• Transaction systems in isolated silos to enterprise database systems that allow rapid integration and collaboration

• Large scale custom software projects to highly configurable "off the shelf" software products 

• Simple single function web sites to comprehensive Enterprise web portals

• Cloud technologies such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 

So what does my technology and software experience have to do with today’s community corrections business?

The Tender Topic of Relapse in Community Corrections

While doing Motivational Interviewing training with community corrections staff, we began discussing the stages of change and specifically the topic of relapse. The stage of relapse brought up an interesting discussion with the group about which clients should get second chances.  

John: “I can see giving the direct sentence clients a second chance but I don’t think the clients coming from prison should get any chances, if they relapse, they are gone.  They should be grateful they even got a chance to get out of prison.”

Lisa: “What do other people think about that?”

Susie: “I think that this is a treatment program and we need to provide the client with treatment, terminating them isn’t going to do anything.”

Josie: “It depends on the client, does he want help?”

Jim: “A lot of times these clients who relapse act like they want help around admin and case management staff but we hear what they really say.  They know they can get away with using and just ask for help.”

The conversation went back and forth with valid points in each direction.

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Trust Is Like Air

I do not personally know most of you, but I’d like to take a stab at your latest marching orders from above.  Does it sound something like this? Implement EBP now!

Pretty simple right?  Use the NIC model (or stay tuned for the release of CorrectTech’s revised model soon) and implement the stated principles ASAP.  It can’t be that difficult, right?  Community Corrections has been talking about evidence based practices for decades now.  Time to walk the talk!  It will improve outcomes, public safety, communities and budgets.  It is a win-win-win.

Are We Losing Credibility?

If this has not been your marching order yet, it will be soon.  Day 1 will include googling something like “community corrections EBP implementation”.  You will find a variety of states and programs that speak eloquently about the value of EBP, but have not been able or willing to actually take the leap.  You will find other states that have demonstrated significant progress in the implementation journey.  Still other states or agencies have tried desperately for years, with sincere intentions and ample resources, only to be met with lack of results that meet up with the promise.  No wonder it is not uncommon to hear an old school criminal justice professional refer to EBP evangelism as “drinking The Kool Aid” or the “Latest Snake Oil”.