Nancy Alfaro as an Exemplary Collaborative Public Manager: How Customer Service Was Aligned with Customer Needs

• Author: Katherine C. Naff
• Published date: 01 May 2009
• Date: 01 May 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2009.01994.x

Administrative Prof‌i le 487

Nancy Alfaro as an Exemplary Collaborative Public Manager:

How Customer Service Was Aligned with Customer Needs

Katherine C. Naff is an associate

professor of public administration at San

Francisco State University. Her primary areas

of teaching are human resource manage-

ment, public law, diversity in public admin-

istration, public management and research

methods. Her research specialties include

equal employment opportunity and aff‌i rma-

tive action in the United States and South

Africa. Previously, she served as a senior

research analyst with the U.S. Merit Systems

Protection Board in Washington, D.C.

E-mail: kcnaff@sfsu.edu

Administrative

Prof‌i le

Norma M. Riccucci, Editor

Katherine C. Naff

San Francisco State University

clerk. It will examine her work as county clerk and

then a ssess her more recent role as director of

San F rancisco’s 311 Customer Service Center.  e

prof‌i le is based on two hour-long interviews with

Alfaro and conversations with seven of her colleagues

who worked with her in her present or former

capacity.

Both periods demonstrate a collaborative public

m anagement style, which is def‌i ned by O’Leary,

G erard, and Bingham as “facilitating and o perating

in multiorganizational arrangements to solve

p roblems that can’t be solved or easily solved by single

o rganizations” (2006, 7). However, in this case, it is

collaborative management with a twist—collaboration

focused on customer service management. Customer

service is more typically def‌i ned as the management

of internal organization processes to satisfy customer

(or citizen) expectations by providing information and

solving problems in a timely and consistent manner

(Wagenheim and Reurink 1991). As will be seen, the

311 Customer Service Center reconf‌i gures much of

the premise of how citizens access government for

service delivery.

The Eye of the Storm

 e tidal wave of marriage license applications at

the county clerk’s of‌f‌i ce was the result of pent-up

d emand among gay and lesbian couples who had

been denied the right to marry under state law. It

also was a r eaction to legal challenges that threatened

to shut down the entire operation at any time. (In

fact, the state supreme court ordered an end to the

m arriages one month later.) “ e line on Saturday

was so f ormidable, accompanied by daylong traf‌f‌i c

c ongestion and happily honking cars on Van Ness

Avenue, that it turned into a take-a-number event

that at times resembled a Las Vegas wedding chapel,”

reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Overwhelmed

workers handed out numbers to 320 couples who

couldn’t be accommodated on Saturday, asking them

to return [the following day] at scheduled times” (Kim

and Asimov 2004).

Nancy Alfaro is the quintessential practitioner of

collaborative public management. More than that, she

is a collaborative public manager focused on delivering

customer service. Finding herself in the midst of a f‌l urry

of activity when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom

suddenly ordered her to allow same-sex marriages in 2004,

she pulled together the resources to perform more than

1,000 weddings in three days. Now, as director of San

Francisco’s 311 Customer Service Center, Alfaro oversees

an operation that has reduced the number of telephone

numbers residents may need to call for information and

nonemergency services from 2,300 to just one. How

Ms. Alfaro accomplished these remarkable tasks can be the

source of fruitful lessons for other public of‌f‌i cials.

On February 12, 2004, Mayor Gavin N ewsom

of San Francisco made headlines across the

country by ordering the county clerk to

license and perform same-sex marriages. In doing so,

he def‌i ed a state law, enacted by the voters in 2000,

prohibiting marriage between anyone but a man and

a woman. By the end of the second day after News-

om’s order, 680 couples from around the country had

been wed.  e third day was a Saturday, Valentine’s

Day, which saw another 450 weddings take place.

 is prof‌i le presents the administrator who was

at the center of that storm, Nancy Alfaro, then county

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