Listening to Clients: Establishing Delaware DSS’s Front Office Client Satisfaction Baseline.

About the Client

DSS, within Delaware’s Department of Health and Social Services, serves approximately 150,000 Delaware residents across its major benefit programs. At the time of this engagement, Iknow was also engaged in redesigning DSS’s core business processes and the physical layout of its largest service center, giving this client satisfaction survey a direct, practical purpose: measuring whether those changes were actually improving the experience of the people DSS served.

Industry Context

Formal customer experience measurement has since become a legal requirement for government agencies, not just a best practice. The Federal Agency Performance Act, enacted in December 2024, requires new government-wide performance goals to be reported by February 2026, and the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act, enacted in January 2025, now requires the Office of Management and Budget to set government-wide service delivery standards and customer experience metrics for federal programs. States including New York have adopted standardized satisfaction metrics such as Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) tracking across resident-facing services. DSS’s 2015 baseline-setting survey — methodologically documented, statistically grounded, and explicitly designed to support future comparison — anticipated, at the state agency level, exactly the kind of systematic client experience measurement now mandated by federal law across government services generally.

Current Situation

DSS had no existing baseline for how satisfied its clients were with the front office experience at local service centers, which meant the agency could not yet quantify whether its ongoing business process and facility improvements were actually making a difference for the people who used its offices. DSS needed a survey approach rigorous enough to produce statistically meaningful results, while remaining low-burden for a vulnerable client population and feasible to execute largely with DSS’s own staff.

• No existing performance baseline. DSS had no quantitative measure of client satisfaction with the front office experience, making it impossible to track whether service improvements were working.
• Resource-constrained execution. The survey needed to produce statistically meaningful results (a target of 300 completed questionnaires) while relying primarily on DSS’s own Quality Improvement Team to conduct interviews, without incentive payments to participants.
• A vulnerable client population. Any survey design had to protect the privacy of public-benefits clients, collecting only what was necessary and ensuring participation remained fully voluntary.
• Actionability. The survey needed to produce findings genuinely useful to DSS’s concurrent business process re-engineering and facility redesign efforts, not just abstract satisfaction scores.

• Design a survey questionnaire capturing client feedback on front desk service level, facility comfort and cleanliness, and improvement ideas.
• Pilot the survey at three representative DSS local service centers.
• Establish a quantitative current-state performance baseline for future comparison.
• Deliver a comprehensive final report covering both the survey findings and the survey methodology itself.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow conducted the survey pilot through three phases — questionnaire design, data collection, and data analysis — with DSS as an active partner throughout, particularly in shaping how the survey would actually be administered in the field.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Questionnaire Design. Iknow wrote survey questions covering three primary areas — the level of service received from front desk staff, the comfort and cleanliness of DSS facilities, and client improvement ideas — along with demographic questions at the start of the questionnaire.
• Data Collection. Iknow and DSS jointly designed the survey approach: face-to-face interviews conducted immediately after a client’s office visit at three local offices, primarily by members of DSS’s own Quality Improvement Team; random, voluntary participant selection; only clients’ first names recorded, with no other personally identifiable information collected; no incentive payments; and a target of 300 completed questionnaires. Data collection ran for seven weeks, from April 9 to May 29, 2015, with each survey taking about nine minutes to complete.
• Data Analysis. Completed paper questionnaires were logged, scanned, and sent to Iknow intermittently throughout the collection period. Iknow manually coded the data into a spreadsheet, performed statistical calculations, and conducted data cleansing — reviewing original paper copies directly when scanned versions were difficult to read.
• Final Report. Iknow prepared a comprehensive final report presenting two sets of findings: an analysis of the survey data itself, covering DSS service levels, facilities, and client improvement ideas, and a separate analysis of the survey approach and methodology.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked closely with DSS leadership and its Quality Improvement Team, which conducted the majority of client interviews, and with clients at three representative service centers who volunteered their feedback on the front office experience.

Producing Statistically Meaningful Results on a Lean Budget

With no incentive payments and DSS’s own staff conducting most interviews, the survey risked falling short of a sample size large enough to be meaningful. Iknow addressed this by designing a concise, roughly nine-minute questionnaire and a randomized, low-friction data collection process — ultimately collecting 314 completed questionnaires, exceeding the original target of 300.

Maintaining Data Quality Through a Manual, Paper-Based Process

Collecting data on paper across three separate offices, then scanning and manually coding it, created real risk of errors or unusable responses. Iknow addressed this with a disciplined data-cleansing process — reviewing original paper copies whenever scanned versions were hard to read — and transparently excluded the small number of questionnaires that remained unusable: 6 of the 314 collected, mainly due to language barriers between client and interviewer, leaving 308 questionnaires in the final analysis.

Operational Outcomes

• Collected 314 completed questionnaires over a seven-week pilot, exceeding the original target of 300, with 308 used in the final analysis.
• Found that more than 80 percent of respondents characterized their wait time at the DSS office as short or acceptable, with only about 6 percent finding it unacceptable.
• Identified DSS work processes, wait times, and the lobby experience as the top three themes among 165 client improvement suggestions.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

DSS found the survey approach worked well enough to adopt the questionnaire and methodology for a broader, ongoing statewide survey rollout, turning a one-time pilot into DSS’s standard tool for measuring client experience going forward. The findings were also incorporated directly into DSS’s business process re-engineering effort — giving the agency’s process redesign work a genuine, client-informed feedback loop rather than relying solely on internal analysis of process metrics.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow completed the full engagement — from questionnaire design through final report — within 12 months, with the seven-week data collection period producing results that DSS was able to apply almost immediately to its broader improvement efforts.

Core Skills

• Survey Design & Research
• Customer & Client Experience Measurement
• Quantitative & Qualitative Data Analysis
• Government & Public Sector Consulting

Methods & Frameworks

• Three-phase survey methodology (design, collection, analysis)
• Randomized sampling and voluntary participation design
• Statistical baseline measurement and data cleansing