Pinar and I spent five hours at the Foreigners Department in the Big Police Station getting my Turkish residency permit today. This gave us plenty of time to survey the carefully designed facilities.
Below are some best practices based on our observations that other bureaucrats should incorporate to ensure their visitors enjoy the experience as much as we did:
- Design a waiting area that doesn’t allow anyone to sit down.
- Make sure the waiting area is not a room, but a corridor used by the tea guy, janitor, and civil servants shuttling papers from room to room.
- Place 11 service windows along this corridor — enough to guarantee there is no room for single-file lines.
- Position all the police in a spacious, air-conditioned room behind glass, allowing everyone to watch them eat cake, drink tea, twirl their pens, and chat on their cell phones.
If you’re concerned about customer satisfaction and impression management, you can’t go wrong with these simple tips!
2 comments ↓
Sounds horrible. I like that you used it as an opportunity to think about how it worked (or didn’t).
Thanks for your comment, Matthew.
Readers: Check out Matthew’s blog (Matt’s Idea Blog) if you haven’t yet. You’ll find excellent posts on productivity and especially GTD.
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