Office of Consumer Advocacy

About the Program

Category: Human Services (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

Counties nationwide have seen dramatic increases in consumers accessing public assistance programs such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Employment Services. Despite these increases, budget cuts and layoffs have created a gaping deficit such that the objective has become to get as many consumers in and out as quickly as possible, thus neglecting service excellence, one of the core values of the human service industry. Recognizing the need for improvement, Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services (MCDSS) created The Office of Consumer Advocacy (OCA) in July, 2011. This office was designed to implement an outcome-based structure for applying service recovery to complaints and hearing requests with the ultimate goal of identifying and correcting agency trends of poor service delivery. Identifying a best practice that could be easily implemented, OCA began to apply the model of service recovery. After five months of being operational this office decreased the number of complaints to the department by 30% between July 2011 and November 2011.