foreign PMA goals customer experience sponsored by servicenow for the government matters thought leadership Network I'm Amy gergis when you think of positive and proactive customer service do government agencies come to mind President Biden's management agenda aims to make every interaction with a federal agency an opportunity to deliver what individuals and communities need to thrive it challenges Federal leadership to move Beyond outdated and inequitable processes and to reduce the customer burden in this program we'll explore the challenges and opportunities to transform how citizens interact with federal agencies and meet or exceed PMA customer experience goals first up we'll see how the Department of Labor responded to the pandemic shutdown to support unemployed Americans joining me now is gandeep alawalia he's the Chief Information officer for the Department of Labor gandeep welcome to the program thank you so much thanks for having me so first tell me how do external customers interact with the Department of Labor so let me talk a little bit about what department of labor does the kind of breadth and how we touch the American people and the employers is sometimes not known to everybody of course we do the unemployment numbers that come out but we protect people's 401ks we are inspecting every mine out there every active mind twice a year every cent of unemployment insurance money it's a state federal partnership but it goes through US retraining America 23 billion dollars worth of active Grant portfolio that's what we manage for the entire nation every temp worker coming into the country comes through the Department of Labor we are the first stop we issue the labor certificate then that is vital for them to apply for a attempt visa to come into the country uh you protect your 401ks health plans all of these are intersects with people the American public either the employers or I also focus a lot on the people who are delivering this vital Service as well so uh they they are the front line of that intersect with the American people we have about 250 applications that are are uh uh user-facing citizen-facing where either uh folks are uh using our whistleblower for OSHA or they're putting in a vets Medallion and they're reporting how many veterans they have hired Etc et cetera well gandeep you did mention unemployment and I want to ask you about the covet shutdown because a lot of people lost their jobs very suddenly there is a big infusion of cash from the cares act that went to the Department of Labor tell me how you use that funding and how did you use it for the larger issue of improving customer experience so I think unemployment insurance first of all I am truly thankful full to our state and local partners and this is a federal state partnership so the unemployment insurance is a program that is run by each state and then admin is administered by us at the Department of Labor in our employment training Administration uh so what we have done is to partner with our state and uh Partners to give them a lot of funding in terms of the in terms of Grants right so that is one step that we have taken uh our focus is threefold one is to reduce fraud waste and abuse in the ecosystem two to improve the equity and timely and and third is timeliness of these benefit uh and what people are getting um in on all three fronts uh they actually affect customer experience because at the end of the day when you whenever when you're out of a job you want your benefits you want them timely you want the application process to be easy and we are working with a lot of States uh we recently also did a uh pilot with New Jersey uh we're trying to simplify uh and introduce plain language right so that people don't have to go through this mumbo jumbo when they've lost a job and it's not very hard for them um and uh we are also doing state grants to understand what is the state of equity and timeliness in various States how do different genders how do people get affected who are on the other side of the digital divide uh recently we've announced a pilot with United States Postal Service where we will be using their network uh next year in order for people who don't have access to State Workforce agencies or have to go in to prove their identity would be able to use these U.S Postal Service locations to do uh uh ID verification well let's talk specifically I want to hear about a specific customer experience initiative that you started that was successful so I think the one we uh that comes to mind is uh the partnership with New Jersey we did a claimant experience pilot with bam where what we did was we used login.gov on one side as a ID verification provider but then also did a lot of plain language implementation and simplified the number of clicks that you have to go through in order for you to get your benefits right I think that has been a huge success and New Jersey is building now on top of that pilot to actually revolutionize the entire experience uh so that has been a great success I am also very encouraged with the Partnerships that we are launching with other states especially this uh the one that addresses the folks who don't have uh cell phones and internet access and using U.S postal service is going to be phenomenal Improvement in my mind so from your experience what are the elements that need to go into a customer experience program that will ensure success so at the Department of Labor we you've been doing a customer experience long before people started calling it customer experience and I I give you the example of uh our foreign labor certificate where we used to issue paper labor certificates on currency like paper they would all get stapled to an application and go to USCIS next while we have eliminated that paper from the ecosystem it saves time because we are not relying on snail mail it comes to you like a United boarding pass and a copy of it goes to USCIS and you can go and go ahead and do that application so what I'm trying to say is we we've baked it into the cake we are not treating customer experience uh as if it's the icing on the cake it's baked into the cake it's the success criteria for every project that we undertake at the Department of Labor well in order to do that though you have to make a cultural change and that's difficult so what what are what are the challenges around that and how have you addressed it so I think uh so one of my colleagues always says uh culture each strategy for lunch and I think that that's so true uh I think the key ingredient is on one side it has to be user-centric design and and and and this this is often thrown around a little too much but I truly believe that it's about the people it's never about the technology you have to figure out what is the business problem how do humans get affected by it and how do you how to apply your digital assets to actually address that problem but I will tell you cultural shifts are about building successes incremental successes look at the program office look at the constituents that you serve and then incrementally positively affect their lives that's what builds confidence in them the culture starts shifting because once you've tasted that success you want more of it speaking of ensuring success though you work with industry Partners how do you do that what's their role in in making sure that this is successful so the industrial partners are vital uh to the success uh for the government at large and these specific programs as well um the reason for that is we do not have the skill sets for every problem that comes our way right so every time you you address a new problem for example if you're doing ID verification or you are going to provide a service in a remote part of the country where you do not have presence right or there is a new Cloud technology or a digital uh transformation technology out there merging Tech these are all skill sets that are required from time to time but you also need some understanding of the subject matter as well right so if it's the unemployment space or if it's the grant space you have to bring these Technologies but also uh have some understanding of the subject area that's where our industry Partners come in and that's where we'll end it gandeep thank you so much thank you thank you for having me up next we'll talk to an industry expert about how federal agencies can achieve these goals by leveraging next-gen it platforms that digitize key services and automate redundant processes foreign [Music] PMA goals customer experience is sponsored by servicenow learn more at servicenow.com gov [Music] joining me now is Jonathan album he's Federal CTO at servicenow Jonathan welcome thank you thank you great to be here you have experienced both having been a CIO in government responsible for customer experience and now on the industry side providing Solutions so what are you seeing as far as trends go across agencies in implementation so you know I think you know that's a great question and a really good way to start because you have to prioritize this work agencies are so big and complicated they have so many different kinds of customers and people interact with agencies for a variety of reasons so where do you start that's the first thing that I hear about and you know once you get started now the question is what are the kinds of interactions that are most important for how a customer of your agency understands and Views the agency's ability to serve them and those interactions you know have a really big impact on how people perceive the agency how they trust the agent see and there's a there there are a number of ways I think you know people get started um one of them that I think is is just so important is to think about the how the data and the work flow across the agency and then people don't typically work with only one program people come to the agency they experience many programs so what's that customer journey across an entirety of an agency across multiple programs maybe even multiple agencies in the government and really design our work and our systems and the experience from the outside in starting with uh the person they're taking that human centered design concept and applying it not just a singular programs or one experience somebody has with an agency but something that crosses multiple layers or multiple agencies or multiple interactions and having something to be that could be consistent and that can be easy for somebody to interact with I think when you think about those as sort of guiding principles a lot of this becomes easier and it becomes less complex about where do I begin and how do I focus well you say you know human-centered design and I wonder what some of those Technology Solutions are what do they look like well I think very often um you know we fall back on technologies that we know and we feel comfortable with in our agencies and when those Technologies are platform technology software is a service capabilities it's a good place to start because there's so much capability that's already designed and developed for these kinds of requirements that the agency can begin you know at the 50-yard line you don't have to start from scratch with building you start at the beginning building something from scratch you can really take advantage of work that's already been done within one agency or within other agencies and that that software as a service at Cloud capability really has an accelerator effect on the work so you can be more focused on that experience and less focused on the underlying technology because that's been taken care of uh I think that's a really important place to start and then of course these these platforms and systems they need to be very accessible so government can appear to the public as as being very accessible so whether that means that it's on a mobile device or it's a website or there is a system in a government office that's very easy for the employee the federal employee to use to serve people it needs to be simple and it needs to be accessible and you know it needs to be reliable the last thing someone who comes into an office needs is to be told well I can't serve you because the system is down so technologies have to work and they have to be things that people want to use and you know that translates into great experiences those great experiences have a have a real long-term effect on how people view the agency and how they view the government overall well you know it's always important to show positive results and to show value but how do you do that with something like customer experience that's that's really very subjective you know again that's that's a that's a really important point because while subjective people often have the opportunity to say through surveys and other and other means what their experience was like and I think that agency really is focused on improving customer experience they're going to to be willing to survey their customers and they're going to collect a lot of data that helps them establish a baseline And I think that Baseline is so important because it's from that Baseline you can measure success and change and understand the value that you're bringing if if we do these systems and we do these projects and we can't demonstrate the value to the stakeholders that oversee our agency the stakeholders that we're interacting with it's very hard to prove that you're successful if you can't prove you're successful it's hard to do more work we turn that around and I can show customer service improved or I can show response times are down or or our scores went up well now I can tell a really great uh digital transformation story and that story is going to lead to more opportunities for more projects and and greater better customer experiences as well I wouldn't ask you about an op-ed that you wrote recently you said this that the public should be treated as a customer of the whole federal government yes explain that so um you know in the beginning we were talking about how so often you have to know where to start is which programmer which which uh which agency and you know the the result of that thinking because we have this agency by agency program by program mentality uh makes the government feel very siled to someone but if if you look at the customer experience executive order you look at the life experiences that are in there and pick one like um experiencing poverty if you're a person who needs support from the government at that time there's a whole range of programs some could be Federal programs some people programs administered by the state some could be local programs you're not necessarily focused on uh which government agency it's just the government and that you know label of government you know can can stick to a lot of um you know in a negative way to to a lot of programs and and people unfortunately because you have one bad experience here and you associate it across a lot of things so if we're doing that outside in perspective where you put that person first and you know you make government all about the people and you understand their journey and you recognize it's going to cut across the federal government the state government the local government and we had a way to bring that data together on a single platform or you had a way to bring that those workflows across these agencies together so you had a connective tissue for that person and they could see how their journey goes from beginning to end how they get the services they need across a lot of programs a lot of agencies and you do it from one place well it becomes very simple but you can't do that if you're thinking about my program and my agency and my customer that individual person is a customer of a lot of programs and agencies so if we say they're a customer of the government the whole government the federal government or this more comprehensive view of government we end up repositioning and reframing this thing about how we serve them and where they get service and what they experience and we're out of time Jonathan always nice to talk to you thank you so much thanks for having me up next we'll talk to a panel from two government agencies on their approaches to designing and implementing customer experience initiatives and where they want to go [Music] powering PMA goals customer experience is sponsored by servicenow learn more at servicenow.com gov [Music] joining me now is Dana chiznell she's acting executive director of customer experience at DHS and Jamie Holcomb is the CIO at the patent and trademark office welcome to both of you Dana I want to start with you you're the first customer experience officer for DHS explain what your role is and what you're trying to accomplish so thank you very much Mimi for having me today uh my role as acting executive director is to start up and build a culture across the Department of Homeland Security that centers the public that centers humans in the services that we deliver uh this is a challenge across the department as there are eight operating components all of which have slightly different uh missions and operating models organization charts uh but everybody is Unified on uh meeting the both the priorities in the executive order that President Biden signed last year as well as the secretary's top priorities around delivering excellent customer experience so a lot of our work is around culture change but it is also in making available the platforms and the tools and the guidance so every service across the department can meet the public where they are and deliver a great customer experience well Dana as you say you know within the many components of DHS every component is different it has different culture and priorities and challenges you know FEMA is very different from the Coast Guard is different from the Secret Service so how do you focus your support so that it's most effective uh we treat each of the components in a unique way my small team or five or six people right now with some contractor support work with them work with the components directly there's a lead who's signed as the point of contact for all of the customer experience work that each of the component does we work with them directly to identify what their needs are how they're making progress what their maturity levels are in terms of CX what kinds of actions they can take to move their maturity levels up uh and then we meet with them every week sorry every month to check in on how they're doing uh what kind of progress they're making where things might be blocked uh we also have a steering committee that meets every month this is a group of those CX leads who are working together on specific projects and efforts around policies uh involving CX at the department including meeting various customers where they cross over among the components and learning about their needs but in addition to that incorporating CX into budgets into policies into performance work plans Etc and Jamie turning to you the patent and trademark office created a customer experience action plan about a year ago what changes have you made over the course of that year here well we were designated a high impact service provider and that allowed us then to put our two different efforts one for patents and one for trademarks and put them together on the same myuspto so what we're doing now is we have an extra effort and focus on ensuring that the experience is not standardized but meaningful and valuable to whoever and whomever is contacting and being part of the experience through the trademark and patent portals well you know every agency and often every organization with an agency has different customers so can you describe your typical customer and how that affects your approach to customer experience you know it's really crazy we have six identified personas or demographics you know things that have a similar characteristic but each of them acting very differently as an example one might be the mechanic in his home garage and how he would relate to my USPTO given that he saved all his money and he's now retired and he wants to have this great invention be patented so that he can take advantage of it he's thought about this all life and it's a very confusing set of rules and procedures and regulations and what we're trying to do is show that workflow which is very complex and make sure that he has the experience to do that we'd also like to take the trademark and for the home uh Baker and some a female coming on board and looking at this overwhelming way to approach trademarks and say I just want to put a cupcake out there well we want to make sure that we include that type of experience within the workflow so that it's not overwhelming and Dina you know isn't the first step really in designing a customer experience program understanding the needs of the user so what's the what's the best strategy for doing that that is absolutely the best way to approach this uh in a department the size of the Department of Homeland Security with the breadth of services that it it provides you might think that that is a complicated question to answer but a human centered design methods are pretty simple at their uh at their Essence uh one of the ways that we understand the needs of users is we go out into the field we go where those folks are and where they're experiencing our services so for example Travelers are obviously an important kind of customer for the Department of Homeland Security at TSA so one of the ways we learn about their experiences we go do some deep hanging out at uh at security checkpoints at airports to see from uh their perspective from the customer's perspective what that is uh what that experience is like how they're feeling about it uh what's working well what's not working well we also look at the employee side so what's happening for them in terms of tools and support to make sure that they're also delivering a great customer experience so that's thing one we go down into the field and we observe directly we might even try out the service for ourselves that's a clear and obvious thing that we could do with TSA uh but not always something that we can do if say we're working on a vessel entry system for CBP but we can go to the port and observe what happened as uh as ships come in and agents handle what's happening there and JB I wanted to ask you because you're the CIO so you have internal customers as well as the external customers so how does the customer experience if you will of your internal customers affect the external yeah that's a great point we provide tools for our internal customers and those tools include things like searching for prior art on the patent side and they could be very exacting I mean they're lawyers and Engineers who really need to find out if there's any prior art that has existed before so that they can either award or reject that patent idea that novel and unique idea that's not used elsewhere so the exacting requirements of an engineer and a lawyer are a lot different than the external customers who are just trying to find out how to apply and what steps they need to take and then you bridge the gap then you have the ability to say examiner meet applicant applicant meet examiner and then they can both Bridge through the digital divide on how best to translate their unique ideas into the ability to award that patent and I think that's a very special and unique experience that we need to provide so here's an issue though Jamie because you know when people use a digital portal like USPTO they don't like to have to do like multi-factor authentication which is very necessary right the security is of course the Bedrock of these digital systems but it affects their customer experience where's the balance exactly there needs to be a balance so on the external side we've tried to relate the fact when people have problems or they put resistance up against that multi-factor authentication we say well it's just like your banking application would you like your money to be stolen because that's what you're saying people can steal your intellectual property and like oh no no no so that's the way to relate on the external side on the internal side we love it when the examiners come up this is terrible at times out after 30 minutes I don't understand why do I have to re-authenticate and yet we tell them well what happens if your dog hits the keyboard by mistake anyway so it's a different way to relate to different experiences Dana you know most people agree that customer experience needs to be a part of the culture what are some steps that agencies can take to to do that and and really bake in uh the culture of customer experience well first maybe um that is a really great question culture is so important uh culture boils down to uh what is tolerated what is uh encouraged and what is rewarded and so when we look at culture change at uh DHS we will get uh where uh where teams are doing a good job already of understanding users needs customers needs uh encouraging that more by offering more guidance more support more tools more coaching more room and time more Staffing maybe even more funding and finally uh how they're rewarded are they recognized for doing this work are they recognized for improvements and the experience and are they recognized on an individual as well as a program in a component basis and JB what what are your thoughts on why customer experience programs fail when they do well I think that they fail because people are not getting into the actual shoes of the customer they're thinking what could be best for efficiency and Effectiveness on their part as an example I do believe that the federal government has designed so many web pages that represent the organizational structure rather than the customer perspective so I'm doing it good for my financial guys I'm doing it good for my procurement guys I'm doing it good for the law office they're not doing it good for the entire experience so that's where it fails we don't put ourselves in the shoes of the customer Dana can you give me an example of a customer experience program that worked really well that you're a part of yeah yeah for for sure there's so many possible options here uh for um for my own personal experience uh contributing to plain language and language access uh is wildly important so making sure that information on the DHS websites is clear plain and actionable uh I've had uh specific experience with this myself on operation allies welcome as we uh as the U.S government brought 85 000 uh Afghan guests to the United States and we wanted to make sure that while they were going through immigration processes and uh beginning to get resettled that they knew where they were in the process what was expected of them and what they needed to do next this had excellent effects for the outcomes for folks uh as they eventually really moved out into their new hometowns across the U.S all right well Dana and Jamie thank you both so much for being on the program nice to talk to you both thank you for having me thanks for having me thanks for watching powering PMA goals customer experience sponsored by servicenow for more on this topic go to govmatters.tv servicenow for the government matters thought leadership Network I'm Mimi gergis thank you