I just had to deal with a state employee. What a difference between attitudes of government employees verses the private sector!
I will not mention agency names to shield the guilty.
My day job involves responsibilities as a professional web designer, so I have personal experience with trying to make our site easy to use and competitive with other providers in our marketplace.
My task with the state government agency was to update some information in connection with payroll processing. Their website had two areas of extremely poor design, which mislead the user by providing ” the obvious next steps” that were wrong and did not work. Rather that being able to either intuitively understand what was needed, or flounder about with effort to get the right result, I had to call their tech support.
After resolving the issue with the first level support agent, I made a comment about two areas of poor design. I commonly try to help in this way with businesses that I deal with, and there is always some degree of appreciation on the part of the agent, and willingness to pass on my comments. Business people know that such customer input is extremely valuable, and they often have to pay money to consultants and conduct “focus groups” to get such input.
However, in the case of the government employee I spoke with today, she was defensive, blamed me, said that the expected use of the website was obvious (it was not) and stating she was powerless to even communicate my input to whom it could do some good.
I was trying to be helpful as I usually do, but the lack of customer service, and the implied lack of pressure on a government agency to be competitive was appalling to see in action, even though “in theory” such I am fully aware of such attributes of the public sector.
My company would be severely hurt by such attitudes as we try to compete. But, hey … good enough for government work.