The movers are gone, your stuff is unpacked and you’ve reported the damage and filed for reimbursement on Move.mil. That means your PCS is over, right?
Not necessarily.
Officials at the Defense Department’s Surface Deployment and Distribution Command (SDDC), which oversaw military moves until the responsibility was shifted to U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), have just one more thing they want you to do -- and they said it’s super important.
Remember that customer satisfaction survey that landed in your inbox? They really want you to fill it out. And doing so, they said, could save other military members from big problems later.
“Moves are chaotic anyway and with everything you have to do, even talking about one more thing is hard,” said Lt. Col. Todd Jensen, who oversaw personal property for SDDC before the shift to TRANSCOM. “The customer satisfaction survey is a sort of pay-it-forward thing.”
That’s because, officials said, the customer satisfaction survey is the primary way they make sure bad moving companies and their subcontractors get called out -- and don’t get repeat government business. Even though your feedback won’t save you from the bad experience you may have already had, it can save someone else later.
Seventy percent of any given movers’ performance score, which is used by the government to determine who to give those moving contracts to, is based on feedback provided in the customer satisfaction survey, they said.
But because only about 30 percent of service members fill out the 12-question survey, the system is missing out on the important feedback they rely on to make bad contractors get the boot. And with so few responses, they are also unable to reward the companies that do a great job, since positive feedback also makes a difference.
“People tend to focus on negative aspects -- but we want to give credit where credit is due, too, so those movers get to the top of the list was well” Jensen said.
You can find more information about the customer satisfaction survey here.
