PUTTING CUSTOMERS FIRST
EPARises to the Challenge of Executive Order 12862
September 8,1994
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Customer
Service
Steering
Committee
Peter Kostmayer, Co-Chair
Shelley Metzenbaum, Co-Chair
Rob Brenner
Geoff Carver
Denise Graveline
Stan Laskowski
Jim Makris
Felicia Marcus
Abby Pirnie
Randy Smith
Bob Sussman
Anna Virbick
Bob Wayland
Susan Wayland
Joe Winkle
John Wise
Customer
Service
Development
Team
Abby Pirnie, Chair
Wayne Naylor, Immediate Past Chair
Nancy Allinson
Kathleen Bailey
Kym Burke
Eudora Edwards
Judy Hecht
Mel Kollander
Cal Lawrence
Tom Maloney
Lance Miller
John Mullins
William Rhea
Karen Shanahan
Alan Sommerman
Rachel Van Wingen
Report designed and edited by ORD's Center for Environmental Research Information
Recycled/Recyclable
Printed with Soy/Canola Ink on paper that
contains at least 50% recycled fiber
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Putting Customers First
EPA's Report to the President
Executive Order 12862
EPA/100/F-94/002
September 1994
Table of Contents
I. Mission
II. Vision, Customer Service Policy, and
Customer Service Approach
III. Reinventing EPA: Customer Service Moves Ahead
IV. Pilot Customer Service Projects
V. Next Steps
VI. Customer Service Action Plan
Page
2-3
3-4
4-6
7-9
10
11
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Mission The people who work at the Environmental Protection Agency are
dedicated to improving and preserving the environment in this country
and around the globe. Highly skilled and culturally diverse, we work
with our partners to protect human health, ecosystems, and the beauty of
our environment using the best available science. We value and promote
innovative and effective solutions to environmental problems. We strive
to protect and sustain the productivity of the natural resources on which
all life and human activity depend.
Our Primary Customer — The Public. EPA's primary customer
is the general public — all of us who live and breathe and share the earth's
environment.
Serving Our Intermediary Customers — Essential to Success. To serve
the public, we work on a regular basis with a variety of intermediary
customers. Our ultimate success depends on how effectively we work
with and influence the actions of the many other parties that deliver
environmental protection to the general public — including international,
federal, state, tribal and local governments; industry, agriculture, small
businesses, and other for-profit enterprises; and environmental and other
nonprofit organizations and individuals.
Key to our effectiveness is understanding these intermediary customers —
their circumstances, where they get their information, the constraints they
face, and what motivates their decision-making. With that understanding,
we can then provide the information, products, and services needed to
support our customers in their efforts to protect the environment.
As a regulatory agency we often need to promote actions, activities, and
attitudes to businesses, government, and individuals that they would not
opt to take on their own, even when they understand it to be in the best
interest of the general public. Our goal is to build a cooperative and
supportive relationship with these customers, supplying them with the
information and tools they need to be able to pursue their business and
personal activities in a way that protects the environment, and ensures —
for all of us, for our children, and for future generations — a prosperous,
sustainable, and healthy world.
To achieve compliance it is sometimes necessary to work with businesses,
government, and individuals in an enforcement mode. We also often have
the challenge of balancing competing interests in carrying out our
regulatory and enforcement responsibilities. In all our relationships,
voluntary and nonvoluntary, cooperative or enforcement-related, our goal
is to handle all interactions in a fair, courteous, and professional manner.
Our goal is also to provide affected parties with a clear understanding of
the reasons for our actions.
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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EPA is working to align the organization, strategies, people and systems to
strengthen communication with the customer and be more responsive to
customer needs. We are committed to carrying out all our work in a way
that reflects a respect for our customers and an understanding of their
needs and circumstances.
Vision
EPA envisions a world in which:
• All individuals and institutions value the environment and choose to
act in a manner that ensures achievement of sustainable environmental
and economic goals.
• The natural balance of all living things is no longer threatened, and all
individuals — rich and poor, young and old —• share in the benefits of
a healthy environment.
EPA will strive to become an Agency recognized for:
• Leadership in environmental protection and environmental science —
domestically and worldwide.
• Strong and effective working relationships with its partners in
environmental protection.
• Integrity in the stewardship of its resources and the management of its
programs.
Customer
Service
Policy
We are committed to achieving customer service equal to the best in
industry. We carry out our mission through increased public
participation, increased public access to information and increased public
access to decision-makers.
Customer
Service
Approach
Our approach to improving customer service is through the following:
Public Access. We are committed to increasing the participation of our
customers in the policy and decision making processes of the Agency.
Listening to Our Customers. We must improve our understanding of our
customers' motivations and circumstances so that we can provide them
with environmental products, services, and information that they value.
Through the use of public roundtables, focus groups and formal surveys,
we will listen to what our customers tell us about the quality and value of
the products and services we provide, and adjust our activities and
resource allocation decisions accordingly.
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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Communicating with our Customers. We must communicate with our
customers so that those who need environmental information know where
they can obtain the information they need in a form they can use.
Reinventing
EPA:
Customer
Service
Moves
Ahead
Our reinvention efforts are designed to achieve greater environmental
results, improve communication with our customers, and involve affected
parties much more directly in informing our decision-making processes.
These include:
Common Sense Initiative. Designed to achieve greater environmental
protection at less cost by creating pollution control and prevention
strategies on an industry-by-industry basis, rather than the current
pollutant-by-pollutant, medium-by-medium1 approach. This approach
will strengthen our ability to understand and support key intermediary
customers in their delivery of environmental protection.
Environmental Goals Roundtables. This year we conducted a series of 9
roundtable meetings around the country to listen to our customers —
government, industry, community, and nonprofit representatives — about
our proposals for national environmental goals. Follow-up meetings are
planned in the coming year.
Ecosystem Approach to Environmental Protection. We have adopted
Ecosystem Protection as one of seven guiding principles2 that apply to all
programs and activities of the agency. This calls for integrated priority-
setting and action by federal, state, tribal, and local agencies; between
government and private enterprises; and most importantly, between
government and the public. Customers will be involved in shaping
environmental goals for their communities, developing strategies to reach
these goals and measuring progress.
Streamlining and Increasing Access to the Regulatory Development
Process. Among our primary products our regulations. We have
developed a streamlined process for regulation development designed to
reduce the cycle-time for product delivery. Moreover, we are committed
to increasing involvement with those who will be affected by a regulation
early on in the rule-development process. This emphasis on early
communication has been underscored by the President's Executive Orders
on "Regulatory Planning and Review" and on "Enhancing the
Intergovernmental Partnership."
1 "Medium" refers to environmental medium - air, land, water.
2 See The New Generation of Environmental Protection: A Summary of
EPA's Five-Year Strategic Plan, July 1994
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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Increasing Emphasis on Public Access to Environmental Data and
Information. Our Information Resource Management (IRM) strategic
plan calls for focusing EPA's IRM efforts on ensuring public access to
information. In addition to states, a Federal Advisory Committee was
created to solicit comments and guidance from a wider range of
customers, including industry, environmental groups, local governments,
and the general public.
Increasing Emphasis on Citizen Involvement. Many of our efforts and
legislative proposals call for increased community participation in
decision-making, to ensure that the citizens most affected by our actions
are able to inform the decision-makers at an early stage in the process. For
example, proposed changes to the Superfund law call for the creation of
Community Work Groups and Citizen Information and Access Offices to
serve the customer better in delivering a key EPA product —
contaminated site cleanups.
State, Tribal, Local Advisory/Operating Committees. Over the past year,
we held meetings involving several key intermediary customers. These
included federal advisory committees, dialogues with state environmental
communities and a tribal operations committee.
The Customer Service Subcommittee of the Local Government Advisory
Committee. The Customer Service Subcommittee of the Local
Government Advisory Committee recently met and identified several key
customer relations issues it felt we should address, including: local
government reluctance to call us with questions for fear of reprisal, the
need for us to communicate our environmental information and
regulations more effectively to local governments, and the need for
technical support.
Office of Pesticides Programs Customer Survey. The Office of Pesticide
Programs (OPP) completed a series of customer surveys to initiate its new
effort to improve the quality of services it provides to the public. OPP
learned that key areas needing improvement were: "timeliness of the
services provided" and "telephone responsiveness." Also, OPP learned
that its survey instrument needed to be shortened, clarified, and targeted
more specifically to different audiences.
Reinventing the Management of Research and Development. We
completed a study of our research and technical support laboratories,
which included an analysis of customers served by each laboratory. Based
on the study, we have directed the Agency to undertake several major
changes including several measures designed to institutionalize the
connection with those who use our research. These include increased
emphasis on peer-review of EPA-funded research by those outside the
agency, and introduction of a competitive grant process both for internal
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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and external research. In addition, we have committed increasing funding
for external research. All of these measures will increase laboratory
interactions with our customers in a way that informs the research agenda
so that ultimately, the public will be better served.
New Emphasis on Compliance Assurance. We recently completed a
reorganization of the Office of Enforcement by creating the Office of
Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA). A key element includes
a new emphasis on compliance assurance to parallel strengthened
enforcement capabilities. This will shift the Agency toward working with
our intermediary customers in a supportive manner whenever possible to
assist them in understanding how to provide greater environmental
protection for the public.
Permit Improvements Team. We established a Permits Improvement
Team in July 1994 to improve our environmental permitting processes,
while maintaining high quality enforceable permits. The Team will
implement recommendations from the Vice President's and EPA's internal
National Performance Reviews. Activities will fall into three major
categories: 1) identifying specific permitting improvements that will
shorten the time necessary to issue a permit; 2) identifying ways to
improve public participation in the permitting process by providing for
earlier involvement and mechanisms to address environmental justice
issues: and 3) identifying how to encourage pollution prevention and the
use of innovative technologies through the permitting process.
Citizen Information Center Opens in Denver. EPA opened a service
center for citizens in Denver in the fall of 1993. The Environmental
Information Service Center (EISC) serves as a central, one-stop shopping
point of contact for visitors and callers; runs a database to link subject
areas with EPA individuals responsible for those areas; serves as a central
repository for publications; and tracks public calls and visits. During the
three month period ending in June 1994, Denver-based EISC received,
handled, tracked, and analyzed over twelve thousand calls and visits.
The activities described here demonstrate our commitment to work with
and listen to our customers so we can deliver greater environmental
protection.
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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Pilot
Customer
Service
Projects
We are committed to :
• Reaching out to our customers to provide them with the information
they need to make environmentally sound decisions and to involve
them in our decision-making and priority-setting processes.
• Setting clear performance standards for our products and services, to
assessing how well we are meeting those standards, whether they are
the right ones, and to adjusting our activities based on what we learn
from those assessments.
We have identified several key product lines thai: will ultimately build a
customer-oriented approach for all of our core business processes and
product lines. For each pilot, we will test the performance standards in
one office, and then, based on the results, expand adoption of the
standards throughout EPA.
Our pilots selected fall into several categories:
• Responding to public inquiries
• Increased public access to information to improve environmental
decisions
• Strengthening our intermediary customers ability to protect the
environment
Pilots 1,2 and 3. Responding to Public Inquiries. The first set of pilots is
focused on improving the way EPA handles incoming inquiries from the
public. We have learned from Baldrige award-winning companies that by
listening and responding to the customer, we can. improve product quality,
improve service, and reduce costs.
Our pilot projects in handling incoming calls, correspondence and
managing a hotline are designed to help the agency develop better
protocols and staff training for responding promptly, courteously,
accurately, and understandably. In addition, more systematic analysis of
the inquiries may suggest opportunities for improved service delivery.
For example, a one-time analysis of incoming calls to EPA Region 2
suggested that as many as 60 percent of the calls received have to be
redirected to other city and state environmental agencies.
The first phase of these pilot projects will focus in responding to general
inquiries; a second phase will develop customer service standards for
responding to case specific inquiries.
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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Pilot 4. Increased Public Access to Information to Improve
Environmental Decision Making: the Toxics Release Inventory and
Community Right to Know. One of the most important products EPA
provides is information about environmental conditions that other
governments, business, and the public can use to make more informed
decisions.
Many of our databases have been criticized by users of the data as user-
unfriendly (criticisms which the IRM Strategic Plan is designed to
address.) The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), in contrast, is viewed as a
much more user-friendly approach to data collection and dissemination.
Moreover, some argue that the user-friendliness of the publicly available
data has influenced toxics-releasing companies to reduce their emissions.
Similarly, EPA mileage ratings of cars appear to have influenced buyer's
decisions to purchase more environmentally responsible cars.
These "success" stories suggest important lessons for EPA-generated data,
and the value of providing it in a user-friendly manner. They demonstrate
the importance of publicizing the availability of information, as well as
ensuring its accessibility, timeliness, usefulness, and understandability.
Our pilot projects on increasing public access to environmental
information — focusing on the TRI and Community-Right-to-Know
programs — will look at these and private sector examples to set
performance standards. The pilots will also develop standard operating
procedures for evaluating how well we are meeting those standards and
for using the results of those evaluations for improving what and how the
agency provides information. We anticipate that these standards and
procedures will then be transferrable to many of our other programs and
information products.
Pilots 5,6 and 7. Strengthening our Intermediary Customers' Ability to
Protect the Environment; Water Grants to States, the Permits
Improvement Team, and the Common Sense Initiative. As discussed
earlier, we rely on several sets of intermediary customers to provide
environmental protection to the public. One set of customers includes
those who receive grants from the Agency, such as state governments,
many of whom are delegated authority by EPA to implement federal
environmental protection laws and to whom we provide federal grant
money to support that implementation. A second set of customers is the
regulated community, including private companies that seek permits from
and are inspected by either EPA or by states with delegated authority.
The Water Grants to States Pilot will strengthen customer service to our
intermediary customers. It will focus on the award of water grants to
states. Draft performance standards are being established in consultation
with the states, to ensure fast, simple, and timely grant awards, allowing
flexibility, wherever possible, to adapt to local circumstances. To develop
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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our performance standards, we are looking at previous efforts to
streamline the grant process already underway in some programs, at the
grant-making processes of other federal agencies, and grant-making
procedures at private foundations.
The Permits Improvement Team will support our intermediary customers
by focusing on the permitting process. In some states, EPA issues permits
directly to regulated entities. As noted earlier, EPA delegates to states and
occasionally to local governments authority to issue permits under federal
law. Permit-writing authority is delegated to over half the states for more
than half of EPA's programs. In this situation, direct customer interaction
occurs between the states and the regulated community.
We are assembling a team of EPA and state representatives to review all
permits issued by EPA, states, and localities. From September through
November 1994, this group will conduct focus groups both with those on
the front-line of service delivery within the agency and to our customers
and other affected parties to identify appropriate performance standards.
A variety of performance standards may be appropriate for permitting
including: standards that ensure those who should be permitted have a
good chance of understanding that a permit is required, that permit
applicants understand the conditions that must be satisfied to submit an
approvable permit, that those whose permits are turned down understand
the reasons for permit denial, that permit applicants are provided an
accurate estimate of the time required for permit review that permits are
reviewed in a timely manner, and that the permit review staff will handle
all interactions with applicants in a courteous manner.
The group will explore the viability and desirability of setting
performance standards in these and other areas — looking at recent state
activities to improve the permitting process, as well as other government
and private sector application processes. The group will also look at if and
how we ought to include customer service concerns in state-EPA grant
agreements.
A detailed implementation plan will be prepared by December, 1994. The
plan will identify those activities that will be implemented by the Permits
Improvement Team, the time schedules associated with each activity, and
procedures and opportunities for continued input from interested parties.
The Common Sense Initiative's goal is to achieve greater environmental
protection at less cost by looking at whole industries and involving a wide
range of customers in developing a new generation of environmental
solutions. This initiative is being phased in over the next several years.
* * *
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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Next Steps For these product lines, we have tentatively identified initial customer
service standards. These accompany this plan, in the form of individual
publications describing each of the pilots and our draft customer service
standards commitments.
Over the next few months, the agency will use focus groups with front-
line employees and customers to test the validity of these standards and
establish benchmarks. Performance standards will then be revised based
on the results of the focus groups.
We are developing an implementation plan for each of our pilot product
lines. Each plan will include:
• Specific measures and benchmarks
• Dates for conducting customer and employee focus groups on
standards and benchmarks
• Method for tracking performance and surveying customers
• Dates for survey preparation and dissemination, where appropriate
• Dates for establishing tracking systems, where appropriate
• Methods for receiving and tracking customer complaints
• Plans for using survey/tracking information in management decisions
and performance evaluations
• Plans for training staff
• Date for evaluation and plan/decision regarding pilot improvements
and expansion throughout agency (rollout)
In addition, by December 1994, EPA will publish customer service
standards and develop implementation plans for several additional key
agency-wide product lines: responses to letters, rules, and electronic
bulletin boards, inspections, and compliance assurance.
Finally, by February 1995, the Agency will identify its core business
processes, and in consultation with its customers, will establish
performance and customer service measures. Also by February 1995, each
office will be asked to develop and initiate a customer service plan that is
aligned with the Agency's strategic plan and customer service approach.
By September 1996, in conjunction with our other reinvention efforts, we
will have published customer service standards for all of our remaining
core business processes, product and service lines.
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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Customer
Service
Action
Plan
Educate all EPA employees on the Agency's Customer Service Plan,
importance and relation to our Strategic Plan and other reinvention
efforts.
Incorporate Customer Service into all EPA employees Performance
Agreements.
Educate all EPA Senior Executives on their roles as advocates of
customer service and bringing the voice of the customer into the
planning and evaluation functions of their organizations.
Identify, map and establish improvement goals for Agencywide Core
Business Processes.
Integrate Reinvention Plans into Strategic Plan with Action Steps.
Align personnel systems with customer service, including, awards,
recognition and promotion.
Train senior and front line employees on benchmarking, customer-
centered process reengineering to support improved service delivery.
Adopt the NPR 800 Benchmark Study recommendations on
Telecommunication in support of improved customer service.
• Improve public access to information through the Information
Resources Management Strategic Plan.
Reengineer key core business processes in support of our Strategic
Plan and in response to Customer Surveys.
Benchmark core processes against the best in business for dramatic
improvement.
Adopt and apply the Malcolm Baldrige Award Criteria as an
assessment tool for measuring EPA performance and effectiveness.
Increase people and resources to positions that serve our external
customers (Streamlining Plan)
Move from media specific service delivery to Ecosystem and Common
Sense Approach.
Incorporate Environmental Goals, Indicators, and Customer Service
Measures into FY 96 Strategic Plan.
• Develop Customer Service Complaint System
• Develop capacity and conduct Customer Survey's in support of our
Strategic Planning Process.
Putting Customers First: EPA Rises to the Challenge
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