One satisfaction survey across 8 campuses, with the compliance report generated from the answers

Philippine government service offices are required by law to measure client satisfaction and report it to the Anti-Red Tape Authority. Bicol University was doing that on paper across eight campuses. iBUCSM moved the survey to a kiosk or a phone and produces the report from the collected responses.

Snapshot

The Challenge

The obligation is statutory and its deadlines are external, which changes what the software has to be good at. Three specific problems.

• Paper suppresses responses. A form handed over at a counter is completed by the minority who choose to stay and fill it in, and those people are not a random sample of the people who transacted.
• Consolidation is the bottleneck, not collection. Gathering paper from every office on eight campuses and tabulating it into one submission is clerical work measured in weeks. It is also the step that makes the data stale before anyone reads it.
• The instrument is not yours to design. The questionnaire follows the Anti-Red Tape Authority's format, covering awareness of the Citizen's Charter and a fixed set of service quality dimensions. The report format is prescribed too. This is an implementation of a specified form, not a product design exercise.

If you have a compliance return that someone assembles from paper every quarter, this is the same shape of problem regardless of sector.

The Approach

One entry path for kiosk and phone. A respondent picks a campus, then an office within it, then answers about the transaction they just completed. The office list loads after the campus is chosen rather than shipping with the page.

The alternative was binding each kiosk to a fixed office so the device supplies the context and the respondent starts at question one. That is shorter for kiosk users and excludes phones entirely, and phones are where the response rate improvement comes from. One path serves both, at the cost of two selection steps in front of every response.

Access is scoped to the office. An office sees its own results; university-level access sits with whoever owns the submission. A single administrative account would either expose every office's results to every office, or withhold from each office the one thing that makes the exercise worth anything to them locally.

The report is generated, not exported. The reporting screens produce the compliance output directly rather than dumping responses to a spreadsheet for manual assembly. Exporting to a spreadsheet would have moved the paper problem into a file and kept the clerical step the project existed to remove.

The cost is that the generator is coupled to a format defined outside the university. When the Anti-Red Tape Authority revises its guidance, that becomes a development task rather than a clerical one.

The Build

Four months, as an intern on a team. I was not the lead and the system was not built by me alone.

I no longer have repository access, which places a real limit on this write-up: I can describe what the system does and what it decided, verified against the deployed site and the screenshots I kept, but I cannot reconstruct what broke during the build or show you the commit that fixed it. Where the other case studies here name a defect and its correction, this one cannot, and that absence is a gap in the evidence rather than a claim that the build was clean.

Results

No numbers. Response rates, completion rates and report preparation time were never measured in a form I had access to, before or after. The university reports that response rates improved once the survey came off paper. That is their statement, not a measurement of mine, and this document will not dress it up as one.

The system is deployed and reachable, verified August 2026. It has had two years of changes by other people since the internship ended, so nothing here should be read as a description of the current codebase.

Next

If a compliance return in your organisation is assembled by hand every quarter, it can be generated instead. Get in touch.