Customer Satisfaction Pilot Studies and Analysis

Overall Satisfaction and Outcomes

Employment and training programs usually judge program quality on the program's ability to help people obtain jobs. Therefore, the most important measure has been the entered employment rate. The natural question is, "How does customer satisfaction relate to the most important outcome?" Unfortunately, there is limited information from the pilots on this subject. We could not directly relate the ACSISAT index to the WIA core indicator of entered employment. However, two states asked respondents in their satisfaction surveys whether they were employed, at the time of the survey. Below are the results.

Table 8: Effect of Being Employed for State A Participants on Satisfaction Generally and with Specific Services

The results in Table 8 show that the ACSISAT index, one question (Compared to the ideal) that contributes to the index, and two questions about satisfaction with two specific aspects of service. These results are a small proportion of 27 satisfaction questions tested for significant differences among employed and not employed respondents. In Table 9, State B participants who are employed or not employed express no differences on the satisfaction questions.

Table 9: Effect of State B Participants' Being Employed on Participant Satisfaction

Comments on Tables 8 and 9

These results indicate that the outcome, entered employment, may not be the most important factor in participant satisfaction. When it is a factor related to satisfaction, it is associated with only modest differences between those with and without jobs, approximately a half point on the 1-10 scale questions and 5 points on the 0-100 scaled index. This suggests that the qualities of services provided and the way customers are treated are as important if not more important than the resulting job. Other research in customer satisfaction lends additional support to this finding.¹¹

Summary>>

¹¹See technical reports regarding employer and worker satisfaction with Unemployment Insurance appeals hearings from 1995, 1997, and 2000 for the Connecticut Board of Appeals in which winning versus losing were only modestly related to satisfaction.