[Music] hi there i'm claudia hoskey from fed insider and on behalf of the george washington university center for excellence public leadership and servicenow i'm pleased to welcome you to today's webinar on prioritizing smooth delivery of customer services please type your questions and comments into the q a pod if we don't get to them during today's session we'll share them with our speakers so they can follow up with you also take note of the resources tab on the left side of your screen to download today's slides and other materials including an in-depth report on customer service management for government we offer live captioning for all of our digital training sessions to follow along please use the hyperlink under the live captioning or cart tab above the slides we'll have the full transcript available in the next day or two and to earn training credit for today's webinar you'll need to answer all polling questions throughout and now let me turn over the reins to today's moderator jonathan album from servicenow to begin today's discussion jonathan um thank you so much uh hi everybody i'm jonathan albaum and i'm the federal cto for servicenow and i have a pleasure being today's moderator so last december the white house issued an executive order titled transforming federal customer experience and service delivery to rebuild trust in government the executive order designated 35 agencies across 17 departments as high impact service providers these agencies receive this noteworthy designation because of their large customer bases and the critical services they provide have a significant effect on the people they serve so from veterans benefits and health services to student financial aid contacting the irs or visiting national parks the agencies that run these services are creating comprehensive action plans and budgets to improve their customer experiences today we have a great lineup of experts to share this topic we're going to be talking about a lot of really important concepts including ways to implement digital workflows to transform customer services into personalized experiences we'll be discussing the idea of universal service approaches that can be used across multiple agencies also best practices for integrating legacy systems and data into modern user and customer experiences and interfaces and we'll also discuss metrics and ways to measure progress in achieving improved customer experience i now want to take the opportunity to have our panelists introduce themselves let's begin with ken corbin from the irs ken hey good afternoon everyone my name is ken corbin i'm the chief taxpayer experience officer here at the irs as well as the commissioner for the wage and investment division and so i know i'm talking in irs lingo but basically wage and investment we are responsible for processing all of the tax returns for both individuals and businesses we're responsible for the toll-free environment when you call in and your walk-in if you walk into one of our offices we also have some other responsibilities around media and publishing and things like that but basically we are your service provider here at the irs and i'm really excited to be here today thank you thanks ken um now let's have john forsler uh i hope i didn't mess your name up too much uh from the veterans administration share his background yeah thanks so much jonathan and howdy everyone i'm john burssler i'm service the chief experience officer here at the va the department of veterans affairs and very similar to our partners our siblings at irs you know we are really serving as the secretary's uh customer experience insights engine and uh really as a shared service service to partner with within va we have whether that's the veterans health administration the veterans benefits administration and the national cemetery administration to ensure that we're really providing the highest quality customer experience and the delivery of care benefits and memorial services to our veterans their families caregivers and survivors i'm also a former marine corps uh veteran i'm a veteran marine corps veteran and i'm a texan so apologies in advance and i'll say a lot of y'alls and howdy's on the call thanks jonathan it's great to have you uh here john and uh last but not least uh jeffrey lush please uh introduce yourself from uh university from us here hi my name is jeff lush i'm i'm the chief information officer for the air university for the u.s air force just a little background the air university serves approximately 400 000 students globally we graduate around 150 000 students a year we have uh campuses in ohio and alabama as well as smaller outreach campuses throughout the globe so we're we're very interested in making sure that all of our customers whether they're coming in to participate in a class or to find um perhaps their their their educational records all of that uh feeds into how we treat our customers and the ability the way that they access our customer service well uh thanks jeff and i think you know you all bring um you know some similar but you know unique perspectives based on the kinds of people you serve and the roles you have in your agency so i'm really looking forward to our our conversation um ken i want to get started with you um you know everybody uh is experienced the past two years in um some somewhat similar ways we've had a transition our customer experience to uh being much more focused on the way uh the way we're served remotely and i know that was very important at the irs so can you share how the shift towards digital services and online interactions impacted the way that you serve the taxpayer absolutely uh it's been a transformative year for us here at the at the irs in addition to being tax administrators over the last couple of years the irs has issued more than 490 million economic impact payments totaling about 830 billion dollars to american citizens over the past couple of years we've also just last year issued more than 200 million advanced child tax credit payments totaling over 93 billion dollars to help the economy and in order to be able to do that we had to do a lot of innovative things to make sure that uh eligible uh citizens and taxpayers were able to come in and access these benefits that were were meant to provide uh economic security uh during the pandemic and so some of the things that we've had to do to shift our digital interactions uh one of the more basic things we did recently was redesign irs.gov our home landing page or digital content uh on the web a couple of other things that we had to do was create tools to allow digital tools to allow uh taxpayers to be able to tell us information uh you know one of the more interesting things about the pandemic is that you know there were a lot of our customer base that received paper checks uh but as you can imagine during the pandemic financial institutions your brick and mortar financial institutions were not open for people to be able to negotiate those checks so that they could have access to that money to be able to provide relief to their households so we entered uh into the debit card space and created a new digital portals to allow taxpayers to be able to provide us banking information that we may not have had at the time that we were issuing those payments and we also of course had to provide new digital accounts for people to know to keep up with those monthly payments for the advanced child tax credit so there was a lot of work that we did through the pandemic to allow those digital interactions one of the more behind the scenes curtain kind of thing i will share with the audience is that a lot of our customer service representatives were prior to the pandemic in our brick and mortar buildings and we had to go to remote work within a couple of months of the pandemic really surging but that gave us the opportunity to provide new services on our web such as ai powered web chat and a sister-enabled chat and just increase the digital filing and payment options uh for uh an online portal for our tax professionals so it's been uh it's been a transformative two years and and we have a ways to go but we're really excited about the journey well um thank you ken i mean it it was transformative uh for for everyone i have to believe uh john do you want to share a little what that transformation looked like at the va yeah absolutely you know overnight we had to convert all of our platforms particularly in the uh in the healthcare delivery realm because we have 300 000 uh men and women that deliver clinical services every day to our 9 million customers of our health care system and because of the pandemic and because of the ex you know the the the the the knowledge that we had at the time we had to convert a lot of those appointments of to telehealth and so va and our from the customer experience perspective uh was able to work directly with our information technology colleagues in the agency to pivot immediately to serve those millions of customers very successfully and as we measured the their experience on the back end of that several months into the pandemic we've found that the experience was actually quite good and trust had gone up over time as we improved the processes learning from the survey results and human-centered design work that we were doing to improve that telehealth delivery experience of course on the employee side because when one cannot have a world-class customer experience without a world-class employee experience you know we we had to shift like all other agencies and companies did uh to to a virtual format and we were able to do that quite successfully on the veterans benefits administration side in particular uh which found that they increased productivity in processing claims and had some set some records uh in terms of uh not only processing claims but delivering a more consistent and speedy customer experience to our veterans and their families that were seeking care and benefits so um definitely turned our our business uh inside out like it did the rest of the the world but i think that we are we're able to learn uh from those those major lessons and develop some best practices so that we can continue in the hybrid environment in the future well those are some you know great stories and i uh i i know that every agency you know had a had a big impact and i'm curious jeff if you can share from your perspective managing students in education what kinds of changes you had to make to ensure that you know people continue to learn during during the pandemic sure so it really it really allowed um air university to take a closer look at the way we deliver content uh to our students globally now we've always had a large remote um team right students that have been coming into the university but it's really kind of fueled that creativity from the university to be able to deliver classes at the flip of a light switch whether it be remote whether it be folks remote in a hotel close to the campus and then when when the covered risk decreases or or you know isolation or whatever occurs we can bring them right back onto campus and how we can kind of flip that almost seamlessly for the students has been a great uh growing experience and really helped us kind of fine tune our approach to being being able to deliver content it you know additionally kind of brought to the surface and that continued need to aggressively migrate local services into cloud-based formats so so since it's service now i'll just speak to the help desk type of services right be able to go around and and collapse those services locally because now we don't have the folks at the facilities or on campus how do we do that more effectively so it's really kind of helped us kind of move forward with those type of initiatives as well well thanks jeff and you know i think you're pointing out the uh you know the changes um really were pervasive uh due due to code from a technology perspective and content delivery it strode creativity as you said and you know telehealth is something new that that sprung up a new website at the irs so you know obviously the the pandemic was quite devastating in so many ways but there are there are these little sort of green shoots out of it that you know i think as a as a country and a government we can build on and when i look at the president's management agenda and the in the recent executive order on customer experience i i think i think the administration is looking at those positive positive things that came out of this devastating time and they're seeing thinking of ways to apply them to to all of government and the these documents you know they call for really um being very focused on the interactions that people have with their government and how your agencies interact across and i'm curious ken maybe we'll just start back with you here how's the irs looking at the requirements in the executive order or the pma around customer experience and thinking about change or other kinds of uh you know initiatives you might take on so i you know i think for us we're looking at the uh pma and the executive order as an opportunity an opportunity for us to really explore and think about better ways that we can interact with citizens so that we can do more collaboration not only within the irs but across the board one of the specific things uh related to the executive order uh you'll see that there's a call out for high impact service providers or there are or call outs of things where our agencies really can do some specific things that will help improve interactions with citizens the example for us would be what we call customer call back technology now i know uh probably to some of the uh folks attending they're probably like you know customer call back technology what really what is that and what is that about so customer callback technology is something that i'm sure many uh citizens have heard or used or seen uh in private sector it's basically when you call our toll-free environment there's an opportunity to leave a number uh it comes into our system and then we have someone who's able to respond back to you and give you a call back as opposed to you waiting for uh one of our customer service representatives to uh be on the line and and and be there with you and so for us implementing customer callback technology through uh 2024 fiscal year 2024 will allow us to reach a goal of about 95 of the calls coming in being eligible for callback and just last year we offered a call back to about 5.7 million taxpayers and we saved 1.6 million taxpayer hours and so that's one way in that we can work to kind of address the executive order the pma and really address some of the services that citizens citizens want but i do want to call out really quick if i could a a couple of really great examples of collab interagency collaboration that happens that really speaks to taxpayer and customer experience one of the things that we're doing that's related to the pma and the executive order is what we call co-location and that's basically where you as a citizen as a taxpayer you can go into one office and either meet with ssa or meet with irs to get the services that you need you don't have to go down the street or go to another town to be able to get those services so things that we've done over the years is that if you walk into an irs office there are kiosks there that you could use to get irs services but those kiosks can also help you with social security administration services and vice versa if you walk into an ssa office the kiosk that they have can help you get services from the irs but co-locating our employees in the same offices also helps that transition of if you can't get the services you need off the kiosk then you have uh live assistance available in those offices and that's worked really well from both sides and i'm so glad you shared that example because that's that i think that's at the heart of the pma in the in the eo on making it easy for people to interact with their government and while you're at it i think uh you may know i worked at the usda for a long time i was the cheaper there worked a lot with our farm services agency there's 2200 plus usda county offices and probably a lot of the same locations as ssa and irs offices perhaps and there's so many of these agencies have the same customer and you know to the extent that a program like that can expand over time and offer other programs it's very uh it's a it's it's a really um big idea that i think people would appreciate because the iraq the citizen then is recognized as the same person across those agencies and very simple and the really big benefit of that there's an additional bonus to that is that in our smaller offices where we might have one or two irs employees usda may have one or two employees or ssa may have one or two employees when you put those six employees in the same office it builds relationships it builds experience in those offices they now have co-workers and a community that can help them see the overall experience which i think is wonderful but it also helps bridge that gap where they could see oh look at this service or the way that usda does or ssa does it maybe the irs can do that as well and it allows that even that kiosk that digital content it creates an ability for people to come from behind the counter and help our citizens who may not have access to the internet or to high-speed uh services or a computer and here you have these these these kiosks for these opportunities that will provide that service forum um in a government office which i think is really great um so john real quick i know that the va is also a high impact service provider um what what kinds of activities have you been involved in really related to the po and these two requirements yeah thanks so much uh so we're we're really excited uh for both the president's management agenda you know objectives and the customer experience executive order um i'll talk about the pma implementation first so we're really excited to be having chosen to lead one of the priority groups with our partners at the department of defense labor and education that's really focused on improving that sometimes difficult transition from military to civilian life and this was selected as one of the kind of top five life experiences uh that was in the interagency space and as most of y'all are probably aware of that this life experience this transition from military civilian life is one of the largest annual transitions of customers from one agency to several others and it's one of the most difficult as i mentioned for those service members those young men and women and their families and really becoming displaced workers in many ways so they're literally moving from north carolina to california or you know washington state to st louis or something to that effect and they're having to re-establish the roots in a new community and connect with different social services in order to be come successful after they've taken off the uniform so our objectives are to really take the existing programs and processes and really bring it into the 21st century by using a lot of the insights that we're collecting now and that we will collect when we start this work in in the fourth quarter of this year to make it much more much more digitally immersive experience you like thinking about the young men and women that are serving in uniform now and that are will be getting out of the military in the next few years and in the future they're digital natives they're the generation that can very much grew up with technology and they're very comfortable with technology so how can we use the tools and the technology available to us to really improve that entire experience and that journey so it leads to increased access into va department of labor and department department of education programs and then of course improves the overall outcomes of our young men and women as they transition out of uniform to become citizens one of the more tangible ways that we're implementing that or that we will use some of those insights and this kind of dovetails into the customer experience executive order objectives is to really improve that digital and mobile experience and to really go further upstream in that transition process to put the mobile app that we have created in the hands of these individuals and their families so that they can have better access and information on the benefits and the care that they're entitled to so it's really exciting to be able to do that and i know we'll talk much more about digital experience uh later on in the call exciting time what strikes me john about what you said is all of the data that you have on these folks that are transitioning is valuable data that opm or other agencies might be able to take advantage of to help fill jobs or recommend people for jobs or push you know give people perspective on a career as a civilian in the federal government work with many great veterans when uh when i was a federal employee and you have tremendous power in that and all that data that you're going to be collecting to to really support people through that process so um i think that there's a tremendous opportunity and we will we will talk more about that um briefly i want to i want to take a uh uh come back to um jeff and talk about customer service sort of uh generally you know oftentimes you know when we're from thinking about things in the private sector you know customer experience might be something we use to position ourselves differently than a competitor we don't always think about it that way in in the government wondering though from your perspective uh at a at an educational institution um how customer service might help you position air university differently or the benefits that you know may come from improved customer experience of your students it's really that learning experience that they have at air university we want to maximize that opportunity and so being able to make available to them kind of an intelligent front end into our customer service environment that allows them you know an ivr type of front end is what we're implementing but to have intelligence ai running on the front end to help them navigate to do whatever they need to do at the university and then i think just as important uh is the back end support from a you know is your team at the air university the faculty and and the support folks are they all dialed in do they have the right level of accountability and collaboration needed in order to meet the needs that come in as as service requests right or customer service issues ultimately we just want to make sure that the airmen and others that come through the air university have the best experience and they don't have to worry about what um you know all the other stuff right they just need to focus on their education so that's really the benefit that we provide for them is you know we give them we we try to make their experience as seamless as possible so that they can really focus on the on the task at hand which is education uh jeff does that give that are you able to give them some perspective on courses to take or a perhaps a a learning path to help them achieve goals based on knowing more about them yeah you know a lot of um a lot of what we do at air university that that learning course right is is really defined for them it did we differ from a public university where you may have a lot of options in our world we kind of tell you what the options are for most part right you come to go to war college or you come to go to this school right and get that level of education but there are some some courses that you can choose yourself but mostly it's defined uh for you yeah very good so uh this is sort of an open question to to the group uh you know based on everything that we experienced during the um during the pandemic how do you think perspective of uh of your customers has changed relative to the service they receive what do they what makes for a good service experience now after having uh you know lived through two plus years of telework and remote service delivery so so this is can i i can go first you know i think you know based on the past two years you know what does good customer service look like i i think it comes down to uh two simple things i think it comes down to choice and access and i think that uh the american citizens and taxpayers are looking for ways that they can choose uh to interact with the federal government ways that they could do that i i you know i saw a question in the chat about the wisconsin ssa and irs offices you know there are uh you know our taxpayers can choose to uh call us they can choose to walk into um the irs office in person they could choose to write us they could choose to try and interact on with us online and the challenges that we've seen in helping to define good customer service is that number one you have to have uh the resources available the people available so for example in our green bay wisconsin irs office for many years we had one employee who i'm sorry two employees that ran that office and over the course of the pandemic people have uh either retired or left for other opportunities that may provide you know a remote possibility so one of the things i think for us when you think about defining good customer service i think it is attracting great talent right getting people to come into federal service and work and so you know one of the things i think that helps us to find good customer service is a strong workforce uh having people come in uh and definitely out you know and encourage the listeners uh there are we have lots of opportunities at the irs definitely encourage you to to come join us come join the experience as we like to say uh but you know choice and access allowing taxpayers to interact and and to figure out how is the best way they want to get answers to questions one of the things we've done over the pandemic is to increase the number of services that are offered in multiple languages right now we offer over 350 uh languages on our toll free line and if you walk into our offices and it's staffed and opened which is not the case unfortunately in green bay then you are able to get an interpreter or get language or get served in the language that is is primary to you and just this year we were able to offer those translation services to our vita program that's our volunteer income tax assistance program where if you go to one of our vital locations where we have volunteers they're able to provide that to you so i think you know choosing how you interact and then being able to access the information you need in those services to me is is how you would define good service that's great i'm keeping a list here so strong workforce uh choice and access of interaction and i'm curious uh jeff and john if you have any uh other concepts that you'd add into this you know category of uh things that define a good customer service experience yeah this is john i i think you know now more than ever because of the experience of the pandemic it's the multi-channel environment that many federal agencies were and prior to is we definitely have the opportunity because our customers are pulling us further and further into the omni channel customer experience environment and what i mean by that is having giving them the ability to contact us in multiple forms be it through contact and call centers social media uh email written correspondence and then of course via uh online chat forms um uh and and other modalities and including a mobile app and other portals that can make how they can access care and ensuring that we're capturing that feedback on uh routine survey so i think we've got a lot of work to do here at va to get to that point of being more omni-channel but now more than ever as i mentioned we're seeing the you know we're seeing the signals even from our customers that are over 70 which is the majority of our our customer population they want to interact with us in in multiple ways and we need to be ready uh to receive that feedback and to receive that way to communicate more proactively with our customers so that we can ensure that experience is world class uh thanks john uh jeff what's this topic for yeah yeah i would just say that you know just a few things and i i guess i would focus back on what ken kind of touched down on was the people part of it you know to get good customer service you got to have happy employees people that want to be there um you know that a good attitude splashes out on people that call in uh for services so the the pandemic has really given us the opportunity to really explore what remote work and will do to our environment and and the level of technology enablement that has truly increased within air universities truly increased our productivity and the morale of our staff as well as kind of opened the eyes a little bit more of leadership saying hey maybe this isn't such a bad idea right we're inc increasing quality of life our efficiency is going up our ability to serve customers is increasing you know maybe this is a good thing so i think all of those are kind of hidden gems on the people side of the house that really makes a customer experience that much better well i think that's a great way to wrap uh wrap this part up and you know i i would just add that as we move on to some additional topics that you serving people how and when they want with happy employees you know that's it that's that's uh sounds so simple um but we know it we know sometimes the government could be it could be harder than that i i've talked with a lot of agencies around these topics and in a related concept that they've sort of integrated in is this idea of not just the choice of multi-channel but being able to uh give people more ability to serve themselves that customer self service and automation has been really important to redefining customer experience post um you know post code so those choices and and channels have expanded for for for many people and you know just pivot to this idea of automation and virtual agents and chatbots in these topics are i'm curious if any of you have integrated them directly into your customer service experiences here at the irs we are absolutely doing that you know i mentioned uh during the economic impact payments and now in some of our options around providing payment options for taxpayers that may file their return and and and have a bill and want to work out some arrangements uh to make sure they're able to pay that we have introduced that ai chat bot uh ability for uh people to get the services that that that are needed and that's not only in our digital content which you see on the web but that's also uh when you call into the irs there's some automation that we're putting in where you could use things that we call like natural language where you can talk on the phone and then the system navigates or tries to help you resolve or get your answer but there there are pass-throughs in that right i mean because all as much as we can you know do automation uh and and get people the answers that they need uh the tax code is very simple i mean uh obviously not simple very complex and so uh you know with that complexity there has to be a natural pass-through for uh people to be able to ultimately get to alive as sister if it's needed uh to be able to get the answers and the service that they need so you know i think that as you think if we think through self-serving automation there needs to be that natural bridge between helping in a self-serve and automated space but if you know so that the experience will be good for the customer if that automation doesn't provide what they need there needs to be a bridge or a connection to a more technical or more detailed assistance or service that will be able to get them the help that they need right better than just hitting zero zero zero zero zero zero you know or screening operator um right that won't that won't work that won't work for the irs i'll just tell you that yeah but but the the virtual agents you know i'll share from some other agencies i've talked to state and local levels also made a big difference during covid because they were able to use those to deflect simple questions um that could be answered through a you know a knowledge base or you know some machine learning chatbot kind of thing relative to sending people into a call center and taking up uh you know call center representatives time on a simple question when they're really complex questions on with an irs program or an unemployment program or whatnot so that coal deflection proved to be very vital for agencies that were overwhelmed by you know with needs of their of their um customers early in the in the pandemic and uh you know from an air force university perspective or the va how does automation uh fit in how do things like uh robotic process automation chat bots again um ai machine learning now these are very popular popular terms and the relationship to customer experience i think is one's that evolving so curious how how uh jeff or john you see that i guess i'll go this is jeff we're we're moving very aggressively down that road we have a lot of self-service type of technologies already deployed and then we're moving even closer to a more intelligent uh way of handling those calls but i think it is critical it's difficult but it is critical to customer experience yeah and similar on the va side here and special thanks to the customer experience executive order it's really helping us kind of push a lot of the ongoing projects a little bit further down the road so we just piloted our virtual agent you know chatbot um feature to about 25 of those veterans who navigate to the contact us page on va.gov or our you know our primary website and now we're moving up to uh support about 50 of those veterans navigating to the contact us page on va.gov to be able to use that that chatbot so that it can continue to feed uh the machine learning and the ai capabilities with the the answers and the decision trees that we need to to scale um to save a lot of the the time it takes to to wait in line at a contact center and we're also using you know when we're talking about our more at-risk veteran populations when we send our surveys out it's our v signals platform every time a veteran interacts with any of our programs and we're able to you know using topic clustering and using artificial intelligence and machine learning based on topics related to homelessness or at risk homelessness or suicide or suicidality or you know prevention of of suicide or crisis situations we're able to get an alert uh every time that is that that open free text feedback is left in one of our v signal surveys and then automatically that's routed to our veteran crisis line or our homeless our homeless crisis line and then those teams those social work teams will proactively then reach out and wrap their arms around those those those homeless or at-risk veterans or or potentially suicidal veterans and make sure that we prevent further crisis and and really address that situation so um we're we're hoping to to get further upstream like i mentioned earlier to prevent a lot of that from ever occurring but it's a really really important movement forward in using technology to better address the access and the increased access and improve outcomes for our veterans uh it's a tremendous example john and um you know this this idea of moving from reactive to proactive is something a lot of people talk about but that's one of the most tangible examples uh that that i've heard described by someone in a role like yours and it's a great reminder that uh the technology that we run the data we manage you know it can save lots and it's serious business so thanks thank you for uh you know for sharing that um just you know continuing to sort of build on this idea of being proactive or managing change around the way we provide services and interact with our customers it's a comes back a lot to culture i think and we've talked about that some of these prep conversations um jeff can you know if you want to you want to share any any thoughts on the culture and jeff why don't you why don't you start on this one um the change management and the culture of change change acceptance and and willingness to change was something that you uh you talked to me about specifically look to hear your thoughts on what we need in order to support better customer experience yeah so for for many of the folks on the call here today that may be federal or state or just even corporate that that have a challenge getting budget dollars to do the things that we need to do culture is absolutely um critical in understanding what our capabilities can be and that really comes down to a few primary things for us i guess the first one really from a best practice perspective is messaging have a clear and concise message of what it is that you need to do what the functional requirement is and then drive towards that vision very simple i call them crayon drawings when speaking to leadership not because they can't understand complex things but because that's not their job to understand those complex things right so crayon drawings make it simple and and uh do that it changed that but but then underneath that you got to kind of present the vision you got to have that functionality because there's there's always something else inside of an agency that's quote unquote doing the same function if it it may just be a perception but they'll always be an objection when you when you bake it down to functional requirements it's easy to have those discussions great i'm glad you have that technology what is it that we do different what's the functionality that we really need and then you can start managing through those gaps and by the type of technology and solutions that you need and then third and the final one i'll share with you today really is the the um accountability for everyone involved in making this change so accountability is a two-way street a lot of people think accountability task management really is punitive by nature i'm checking up on you it really has very little to do with that but more to do with the ability that you have to manage the flow of information and your end result and that directly relates to the confidence that leaders are going to give you all three of those items directly will relate to the confidence that leaders will have in providing you the proper funding to do what you need to do right be able to clearly clearly define the vision step two make sure that you know what you want functionally and that you've already done your homework on what's already being paid for within the organization and then three make sure you have that level of accountability so that you can show that you're making progress and that you can protect everybody that's within that project and making them feel accomplished as well so all three of those i think are a great path to get to um to get to funding and moving forward well that that's uh those are great reminders um i'm sorry someone else want to chime in uh i i would know those are those are great reminders and you know just starting with the vision what are you trying to accomplish all the time in government i i spend all the projects i worked on can't tell you how many times things came to me without that most simple basic uh that basic concept and it's very hard it's very hard to get buy-in at all levels of an agency agency without that and i love your your piece on accountability so those those are those are three you know big ideas i think that tie into customer experience and the change related to the way we serve customers to meet the tenants of the eo to meet expectations post post post pandemic and you know if i could add anything to that you know you mentioned jeff know what you want i mean there's also something in there about knowing what your customer needs or customer wants and having some kind of dialogue uh with them that allows and i think maybe ken you you mentioned it earlier being able to capture feedback that can can help you continue to change and improve um and improve your approach so you know very uh you know very good um jeff thank you for thank you for sharing that uh john i wanna i wanna jump over to you for for a second and um i'm curious about any any comments or thoughts you have on metrics and things that you're doing to gauge your success at the va as you continue down this path yeah absolutely well when we talk about customer experience metrics you know we use trust ease effectiveness and emotion and the scores that were provided on a daily weekly monthly and quarterly basis from the millions of veterans that take our surveys every year so you know we we have that real-time voice of the customer that helps inform leadership when they're making strategic level decisions on on what the customer uh is experiencing or will experience in the future and how we can improve that i think from the the programmatic level the operational level we're able to then see when customers enroll and how often they engage and then we can correlate that to the survey uh results into the experience they're having and then be able to determine courses of action to improve the process to improve the programs in real time so there there are a number of other operational metrics that we can compare to across the enterprise ranging from health care to the delivery of benefits services and memorial memorial benefits but there are so many different metrics that we can use as our barometer for success one thing that you know secretary mcdonough and and immediately identified and asked us to promote was our quarterly trust survey that we now publish on our forward-facing website va.gov trust which is really our north star in terms of our if our net promoter so to speak um for when we're asking veterans their what their customer experience is and there you can see in that quarterly dashboard of you know what the trust looks like the trustees effectiveness and emotion looks like across the the administration but also across different age demographics different race and ethnicity demographics different gender demographics and um and many other different experience perspectives that really like i think help continue to inform policy and continue to inform our strategy and that was va.gov trust yes sir that's the one i think a lot of people will want to check that out it's uh i mean it just the fact that you um ask your yeah and use the data i think is something that helps to inspire inspired trust especially as people can see that reflected back in a subsequent experience so um you know we only have about uh five or six minutes left and i i wanna ken i wanna ask you very quickly um about how you've partnered with industry uh or other experts to make some of the improvements at the at the irs and then we're going to quickly uh conclude with some lessons learned from from each of you so ken how have you have you worked with uh service providers to improve customer experience so we you know we've had the opportunity to work with a a number of both uh federal and private sector partners to [Music] help us leverage or improve the experience you know with our other uh federal partners such as va and ssa uh you know they were we were able to work with them to uh get information that would be needed to compute uh eligibility for stimulus payments so that citizens would not have to come to the irs uh and provide us something we worked with a data exchange to be able to get that information into our systems so that we were able to compute uh eligibility without any action by citizens and that was so so important i think for uh the success that we've had with the economic impact payment so definitely you know tipping my hat off to uh to jonathan our partners at va and our partners at ssa that aren't here today but absolutely could not have done it without that partnership and creating that data in a way that was useful or helpful with other you know private sector partners we have partnered with financial institutions with other companies to help us you know perfect the ways that we are able to ensure that the data that we have where we're putting money where we're depositing money is accurate and that comes from working with a lot of the private partners and i will say unique to the irs is there's a whole industry right that helps create software that that many taxpayers use to file their returns or tax professionals use to file their returns and so through that partnership by working with them to provide language or to help uh you know create a seamless theme that has improved the experience around setting expectations around refunds so there are a lot a lot of examples i know we're short on time but definitely partnering with both public and private sector in the tax community has made it better through these past couple of years and you know i couldn't think of a more timely uh person have on our on our panel i'm sure there are a lot of people who who like me have a stack of documents on their desk that need to get their taxes filed in the next three weeks so knowing uh the some of the work behind it some of the uh connections can that you and the agency make to make it simple to work through this time which of course can be stressful and you know challenging for some you know it's definitely reassuring so um i i'm glad to know that's the kind of work that goes into it so again just a few minutes left jeff i'd like to i'd like to start with you if you can share a lesson uh learned a best practice something you'd like to leave our audience with about uh customer experience changes you you've made what you've learned through the changes you've made or other kinds of experiences that have improved um air force university for the student i'd love i'd love to hear from you sure so i think the the big takeaway here is like i mentioned before define the direction that you want to go be clear about where you want to go um that will help a lot and then of course leverage cloud technologies when possible if not all of the time it will save on money uh reoccurring funding cyber costs a whole bit so i would definitely it's been a huge blessing for us to go to cloud-based technologies uh to move forward with our customer experience great great suggestions um thanks chef um john final thoughts uh don't my advice would be or my lesson learned rather would be don't start with the solution in mind you know really you know do the go through the motions to really invest in a human-centered design sprint at better listening to the pain points the bright spots and the moments that matter along that customer journey so that you can you can directly address that in in your customer experience strategy and you know a great lessons learned a lesson learned and a great example of that is and this is to caroline who wrote in the chat on her va.gov experience we we literally used our own we took our own medicine so to speak and we conducted a human-centered design sprint focused on what the va.gov website used to look like which is very much a commercial about how great it uh or the agency is and like it had our financial reportings which you know is fantastic but not most customers aren't interested in that most customers want to access their care and their benefits and find out how to navigate that extensive system of services that we offer so we took those insights from directly from several focus groups and in-depth interviews and surveys that we did with our customers and we completely transformed the way that our website is presented now so if you go to va.gov today you'll see the top 20 most utilized customer transactions right in in front of your eyes ranging from accessing your care online and speaking with your clinicians scheduling an appointment to filing a claim for benefits to you know making sure that you're you're checking in with um uh with your with the national cemetery administration and doing your pre-need applications or speaking to the family members of veterans that that need those services and it's completely uh revolutionized i think the way that that our veterans access our services digitally and we've got the the quantitative feedback to prove it so it's been a really great experience being a part of that and we're only getting started with this the incredible authorities that the pma and the cxeo are affording us i think there's a lot more to talk about uh there john which we'll have to get to in another another session um but i would love to do that uh and ken uh a final thought or lesson learned for our audience you know i i i think the lesson learned for us has been that some of the best solutions can be the simplest ideas uh you know one of the main things that we have learned is helping customers set expectations without having to go through a great deal of effort to be able to do that and so things like on our irs.gov to put up an operations page that gives some general information about where we are with return processing and things like that have really been uh simple uh solutions that i think have helped a lot of answer a lot of the questions that people may have so you know i will say this i think the lesson learned is that everything doesn't have to be all the bells and whistles uh sometimes keep it simple and and people will appreciate that oh that i think that's a great way to uh help bring us home we don't worry it's easy to over complicate things and that's a great reminder not to my uh my one additional thought for for the audience is very often we can begin down these projects and we don't really understand our data or we don't understand what the the work in our organization to serve the customer how that work or data flow through the organization and uh i i always remind people to take a little bit of time up front understand these things so you can change it in a way that makes sense for it for a digital government not just changing how you think makes best do do some of this upfront work that you're you're describing it can make a big difference uh so and and help you refocus maybe on those straightforward ideas that are not overly complicated so i i want to thank you all for participating i think this was a it was a great conversation this idea of customer experience is a huge opportunity for the federal government and we know where the administration's come down on this with an entire pillar in the pma and executive order on customer experience you know we can rebuild trust in government but you build trust in drops you know you say that you can lose it in buckets but you build it in drops and each of these customer experiences like you know we've seen in the in the chat here these different positive experiences those things are um it drops in that trust bucket that can really lead to a change over time about how people see and interact with their government i really appreciate all the work that you all are doing to um you know to advance the the nation so thank you for that and to uh to our audience i want to thank you all for attending and for for participating in the the q a i also want to thank the team at fed insider and my team at servicenow for helping to make this session possible i'm going to turn things back over to the fed insider for some final thoughts and a final goodbye so from me thank you and i hope to chat again with you all very soon thanks jonathan and again thank you to our audience for your participation today training certificates will be emailed after the webinar ends and remember to log back in in the next day or two to download a copy of today's transcript we have many webinars in the works so be sure to visit fedinsider.com to see what's coming up and to register for multiple events at once and while you're there check out our podcast feds at the edge and with that this is fed insider signing off you