[Music] foreign will explore how agencies are taking direction from the president's management agenda and customer experience executive order by putting experience first and re-architecting how work gets done please join me in welcoming to the stage John borschler Chief veterans experience officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Pamela Powers managing director at KPMG Federal Consulting and Arun Iyer principal executive architect and field CTO at servicenow thank you good morning everybody good morning so by the way I hear Dr I here no relation okay with the same name good Milestone day for our years so so let me introduce myself I'm a field CTO with servicenow working across all of federal and I have here our guests who are going to share their experiences if you can introduce yourself briefly all right Pamela Powers hello everyone uh I started my career at the Air Force Academy many years ago with a degree in organizational psychology and then spent the next 28 years in the Air Force realizing that organizations really do have a psychology retired in 2018 and then went to work as a senior leader on the civilian side first at the office of the secretary of defense for personnel and readiness and then over at the Department of Veterans Affairs where first I was chief of staff and then acting deputy secretary it was a real honor to work in John's organization and serve my fellow veterans which is great I've been with KPMG for about two years on the federal transformation delivery side and it's great to be part of an organization that is a leader in customer experience and has incredible professionals providing value delivering excellence and helping organizations deliver great customer experience uh so it's good to be here today I'm excited about the discussion thank you Bob and John and good morning howdy I'm John versler and I and experience officer at the United many years ago I started my career in the military as well like Pam but uh in the Marine Corps and when I got out uh um I pursued a a career in the public sector and makes a private sector public sector doing ux UI design and human centered design so it's really awesome that VA has such an investment in the customer experience and the employee experience which of course we'll talk about here today but if y'all didn't know and because both Pam and I uh represent the VR represented the VA at different times in our career as the largest Integrated Health system in the United States we got about 450 000 employees so it's a an incredible effort but a very Noble one hey thank you thank you both for your service and continued service to the veterans so let's kind of jump into the theme of our you know Federal Forum here we said transformation accelerator and we're going to start with the transformation part of it and as the title of our sessions is you know customer experience and employee experience together they are leading towards transformational experiences so can you share you know why is it considered critical that CX and ex go together and you know your experiences uh in your delivery as well as ownership of solutions well in in my view as the chief experience officer at VA we not only focus on customer experience but we work on employee experience as well because truly you know one cannot exist without the other if you want a world-class customer experience as most of you all know you really should have or try Endeavor to have a world-class employee experience and what we're finding especially on the employee experience side these folks who are in the field whether they're clinicians or they're delivering benefits or they're managing our cemeteries across the country they're engaging with hundreds if not thousands of veterans on a weekly monthly quarterly basis and so they're reflecting in their own uh employee experience the pain points the bright spots and the moments that matter and the customer experience so we're learning a tremendous amount from our employees about how to solve for customer pain points yeah I think it's really important to look get at it as an ecosystem of people serving each other and an ecosystem of processes and technology that all collaborate to create that experience I think a lot of times organizations will focus on an app or a website or a call center specifically but they don't look at everything behind that that creates that experience for example you know a lot of federal agencies may have a great call center with empathetic employees that provide great resolution to a problem but then they turn you off to another part of the organization that makes you send in 10 forms via fax and you never know if it gets there you never know if somebody is working on your problem and so you know there it's all interrelated and I think organizations need to look at that when they're starting this this CX Journey great I mean that brings more kind of specific point I want to ask John uh you know in what specific ways is the Veterans Affairs or you know generally the federal government trying to make that Service delivery or the operations more human-centric and kind of Citizen focus citizen-centric and why is it important yeah absolutely I mean VA in the last seven years we've invested heavily in the human in a large human-centered design practice some of which we may have worked with some of y'all in the room in different projects and it's incredibly important and we've seen this dramatic shift in what we when we started measuring trust ease Effectiveness and emotion in fiscal year 2016. we're at 55 percent trust and as we developed uh and just studied each individual business line using human-centered design and and applying lots of solutions to those pain points we saw a gradual increase and today we're at 77 percent trust which if you think about the way that we capture our trust score is on a quarterly basis is very similar to the net promoter score system in the private sector so 77 percent is pretty pretty good if you think about it the government version of a net promoter score so we've seen the results in the investment in human centered design and how you can shift an organization from what we used to be very organization Center design like because we run the VA we know what's best for our customers well not exactly like using the customer voice and the voice of the customer to then change and improve those processes over time and I would say that it has a effect on employees as well and the employee experience during that same shift in time or the period in time the employee satisfaction increased dramatically VA at one point about five years ago was 17 out of 18 best places to work in the federal government and now it's in the top five and I think the CX strategies had a big influence on that yeah so I think you brought some very good measures you know on how you measure success because sometimes experience is very difficult to kind of capture in terms of the in a quantifiable way right but you you talked about this earlier in your discussion on how better employee experience can lead to better customer experience and sometimes what happens is that the middle office or the back office is where some of these are even though you might not give a fancy and consumer grade customer experience to the citizen you're still able to improve the employee experience so the End customer gets a better experience but in your experience what are some of the initial steps and what are some of the quick wins that you know the members of the audience can take back and use in their organizations sure so uh KPMG for the over the last decade has been serving in customers across thousands of Brands and they have they have a really great uh report that they put together called the customer experience Excellence report and it shows you know what organizations out there in Industry are doing well and why and so um you know one of the things that we've seen is the public sector has been notoriously at or near the bottom every year VA was not measured and you know they didn't have enough respondents I think that that you all would have skewed the scores but this is the first year that we've actually done a government report as well and there's some really great insights that we can learn but I think the reason why government agencies are at or near the bottom is is for they have several challenges that the the industry doesn't have the commercial sector doesn't have things like aging infrastructure I think I I read somewhere that 79 percent of Federal cios say that their aging infrastructure affects their mission and I think you know a byproduct of that is their customer experience they also have uncertain long-term budgets it's really hard to to do a transformation I'm sure you all know this uh over multiple years in the federal government because that budget is uncertain and then change of leaderships happen often right and Mission priorities change and so some of those transformation efforts may not make it but to your question uh organizations just you know especially in the federal government side they need to get in the game they need to start this journey and they can start small they can start they can look at um high impact uh small changes that make a difference and some of those are low cost uh and then you know I think one of the the things that federal agencies can do and va va has done this well is create a cxo office that is that reports to the secretary that has the authority that has sufficient funding and resources to make a difference and then once they start that change journey I think it's really important to focus on the Discovery phase and I'm not just talking about a few surveys of your customer I'm talking about deep human centered analysis to understand the pain points understand the challenges what motivates your customers you know what influences them how they want to be served that upfront analysis is incredibly important for organizations yeah so I think I think you bring a very good point for I think people to take away that high impact low cost so you then have some quick wins some successes and then build out on that and you prove the point so and you talked about the empathy part of it and you know kind of uh understanding the users needs and a lot of analysis and Discovery so I want to take us in a different direction um because TX as some experts in a different uh analyst organizations talk about it as ex employee experience CX customer experience and and which is multi-experience so what this does is it brings different channels different uh you know aspects of Technology but I also want to kind of spend a little time on especially because you serve the veterans uh and who have served us and you you have had past experience in this this is the whole question of digital accessibility where there are people with uh temporary or situational or permanent disabilities and how do you kind of incorporate um you know maybe AI maybe Automation and all of these to create that TX as a total experience I mean both of you can share your background and experience around that yeah and and just to touch on because ex and employee experience still is very much a big part of the TX or the total experience and I love TX because I'm from Texas and the CMOS same code everywhere in my in my sector in my industry really jazzes me up so um so in terms of what we've done uh in terms we've invested heavily on the CX side as I mentioned you know 165 different business lines consistently measured through millions of different surveys in a great platform and through V signals as we call veteran signals we've done we've taken the same methodology and applied it to our employees instead of doing a Once In Time One annual all employee survey which is kind of a snapshot an annual checkup if you will of how the employee feels about their experience we're doing pulse surveys on a quarterly basis to about 40 000 employees and what like once again we're getting a lot of those results and we're able to make changes to the employee experience like onboarding we found out onboarding uh shocker at the federal government is a really bad experience so we created an onboarding a welcome kit just like we have a VA welcome kit for our customers we created a customer or an employee welcome kit because they're important customers too in this whole Endeavor we also created a buddy program so it's not a mentorship program it's somebody it's of your same grade coming in and kind of walking you through all the administribia of that onboarding process and we've seen some market results we've also found that some population groups of employees are just like on the veteran and the customer side are underserved or their their experience is is not as high as other employee employee types so we've really delved in using human centered design to better understand how we can deliver a better employee experience for some underserved populations taking that into the total experience or you know VA is still very much a multi-chan channel customer experience you know we're not taking advantage of the full Suite of CX and ex capabilities like some private sector companies but with those multi-channel those channels that we are taking advantage of are really kind of disrupting the way that federal government thinks about these things so once again going back to surveys and applying artificial intelligence to that when we have a veteran respond to an outpatient services survey for example that is our largest and most taken survey by far out of the 165 business lines when they they can do their one to five likert scale of course and then they can leave free text comments and we use that to not only you know firm up customer sentiment and actually deliver to the providers and conduct service recovery on the back end to make sure that they have a wonderful experience chance but we can also identify crisis not only in terms of Mental Health crisis but housing crisis or Foods food crisis by keying in on different words and topic clustering around different terms and then our veteran Crisis Line our homeless Crisis Line will reach out immediately within 24 hours and wrap their arms around that individual if they if they uh if any of these terms show up or any of these topics show up and ensure that they're you know you know concierge they receive that concierge care so that's one good example another good example of how we've modernized va.gov and I think this was under Pam's leadership uh in the in in a couple of years ago we took very much an organization-centered website you know we had a picture of the White House we had the VA budget like customers don't care about that stuff right like they want to know how they can message their provider they want to know how they can set an appointment they want to file a claim or check the status of a disability claim and so we took very much that organ organization Center design and and applied that human-centered design and now if you look at va.gov we went from very much function to I'm very form to function right and it's four quadrants that address the top 20 transactions that one can have with VA we then took that into a mirror image and created a mobile app which is now for Generation Z and younger older younger Millennials everything's in the palm of our hands I mean all of us who aren't Millennials or Generation Z but that's 90 of the military now we have to think about our future customers and how to better design for them because the majority of our systems are built for older Generations so we're very much trying to pull a lot of these experiences together to maybe one day get to that total or Omni Channel experience at VA yeah yeah I mean I mean this is I just want to kind of say that I don't know if a lot of the private sector is doing as much as what you were saying and so it's really impressive to kind of collect that whole you know from the sentiment to somebody calling and reaching out that's impressive so I was just going to add to that va.gov website the team interviewed and had part of their development and 500 veterans so they really got that human-centered voice from their customer which is the Veterans and they there really has been a shift from the organization to the veteran uh but I would add on the digital transformation side I think you know you all have seen this in practice and we've certainly seen this in the federal government that a lot of times organizations start with the back end they they design a really great system that works really well but then it doesn't meet the end State user or the customer's needs you know we recommend that you focus on that front-end Discovery first before you even design anything and I think you all know that but it's really important and I think that's one of the great things that VA is now doing is they're focusing on with all of this legislation that has come down from Congress they're focusing first on the the veteran and what they need and then they're designing the solution to implement those Congressional requirements so talking about Congressional and you know going to the other branch of the government so how are you aligning with the president's management agenda in terms of delivering a simple seamless secure customer experience and some of the measurements that you talked about earlier are they kind of aligning to those agenda items as well yes actually uh so we have been given the opportunity because the of va's investment Strategic investment into customer and employee experience our deputy secretary Donald Remy who's going to be speaking I think later today at the conference along with deputy secretary Tien from Department of Homeland Security if I'm not mistaken he is the life experience lead for the sometimes difficult transition from military to civilian life and for the president's management agenda so we're focusing on five Federal life experiences that Americans May encounter whether that's surviving a disaster or having a child or recovering from Financial shock but one of the five is that sometimes difficult transition from military service into civilian life and to VA and to many other federal agencies and to the communities that many of us return to 200 000 of us young men and women throughout turn to every year the largest number of displaced workers in the world I might add every year we're turning over they we have a customer acquisition problem less than half of these veterans when they become veterans and their families access VA services but then those first few years post service so how might we not only better acquire them but ensure that they have a world-class experience and get enrolled to our programs increase access to our programs and then and thereby improve the outcomes so we're working with in this cross-agency group that deputy secretary Remy is stewarding leading I don't want to say leading because the Department of Defense doesn't like when you say that the stewarding the federal life experience so with Department of Defense all seven service branches since now we have space force and Coast Guard as well and the Department of Labor to really rethink this this journey because it is a difficult one when you're not only moving from one place to another but you're also you know taking off that uniform and you're losing a bit of your identity in your are having to figure out the next moves for you and your family and it can be very shocking so how might we better design so that we're much further Upstream of that transition process we're actually engaging service members and their families when they're entering the military and so they so they log into a mobile ecosystem that can give them a full Suite of federal services using login.gov or or some other platform to make sure that they that they don't fall through the cracks and as it relates to the customer experience executive order that President Biden signed in December of 2021 which is the first of its kind I'm sure many of y'all are very familiar with it but it really gives us the ammunition that you know that that we've been working on for many years to not only improve that digital experience but literally shift into and invest more like we're saying into the mobile experience to to design for that future generation yeah VA is easily embed embed CX in the fabric of the organization right it's it's part of everything they do I mean there's a lot more they can do and there's you know you know a journey ahead but they've certainly come a long way and are a model for the entire federal government yeah so I think you know we keep talking about strategy right and I'm going to use a much uh used cliched statement saying culture it's strategy for breakfast so so now how do you you know and with your delivery kind of approach to this how do you gain that employee support how do you gain buy-in for you know making that happen you know from your experiences we can share Pam yeah culture is so critical uh and not just to transformation but just in general engaging your employees is just as incredible uh important engaging them early on having them part of the change is is critical uh when an employee understands what's happening understands the why and is engaged and and is able to provide feedback they feel invested they they understand the change and they they um you know support it I would also say that one thing that we found helpful is incorporating change Champions throughout the organization those that understand the ideal culture and the live the values of the organization and can Advocate on behalf of the change but also provide feedback and that feedback is just as critical establishing feedback loops and VA does it really well with the signals program to understand you know not only where the issues are so that organizations can focus their efforts and their funding on those those specific issues um but also to help Advocate and as we talked about earlier uh help you know evangelize the fact that CX is working right when you're measuring it when trust goes from 55 to 80 percent when inpatient and outpatient scores for their health care are at like 90 percent which is crazy and it's not seen in the private sector anywhere you know you're making a difference and you know those CX strategies are making a difference so that that feedback loop that data analytics is really important to helping the culture and and that engagement is is really important so you're almost talking like you know the connection of the why to you know what you're doing at various parts in the process towards your audience or your population that's really the connection that brings the buy-in and you know facilitates that whole cultural shift towards making the experience more important looking at it outside in versus what you said like we built it and they'll come versus now we're looking from the outside empathizing and doing that so this has been you know uh very interesting and a lot of experiences that you have shared uh but you know our audience comes from various different uh parts of the federal government and Industry uh I would like to say if you can share maybe one takeaway each on you know what when you're getting into TX what is that one takeaway both of you you know if you can share well just it's just uh add on to the last point and um you know making the how easier for those business units and those employees that may not be as exposed to you know customer experience principles and you know they everyone still views it as customer service and customer well it's a little bit more proactive than that right I mean it's a be it's trying to solve these problems for future customers based on the service that we're delivering to the existing customer and I think making the how easier so a lot of folks in the government are very quantitatively driven right I need to have a big box survey with you know tens of thousands of responses to show me you know what the problems are well you're not gonna it's harder to get that if you're only answering asking certain questions right and even if it's 150 question survey God God forbid then you're only still only going to receive 150 different insights per person but if you interview 500 veterans like we did for V8 the modernization of va.gov front door 500 veterans can give you hundreds of thousands of insights by sitting down with an individual for an hour can really show you the pain points the bright spots and the moments that matter across their individual customer journey and then you reach that point of data saturation we're like okay well these are the major key insights we should focus on one to seven or one to three or one to five and then and then go forward and show that business line how you can make that transition and now that we've had so much success it's easier to recruit and convince those business lines that are not yet under Under the Tent so to so to speak so in terms of the the total experience you know I think back to Pam's point was critically important on the backstage is just as important as the front stage so as you're designing a better front stage what the customer sees you have to make sure your backstage is also being modernized and and connected at the same time you know we have so many disparate platforms that I begin to lose count sometimes and and that total experience when I whether I call a contact center or I'm engaging with our va.gov chat bot or I'm emailing my provider or messaging somebody on my mobile app they need to have that contact history just like I would if I was calling USAA for banking or or insurance so I think that there's a lot to be said for the how important the backstage is yeah I would just add that um bad customer experiency roads trust in government there's not a lot of people that trust government right and and not a lot of people that have good experiences when they access government services and a lot of transformation efforts don't think about CX it's kind of an afterthought and so I would just encourage everybody as you're developing these solutions to to think about CX up front uh and and ex and and every every other acts possible because it's really critical uh and there's some great things for the bottom line as well you know less training lower costs improved efficiencies better citizen experience better employee experience empowered employees and empowered customers that can make informed decisions that work for them so I think it's really important that we think about CX up front and develop strategies to help the organization improve great um so you know I just want to kind of round out this discussion saying why do we talk about CX and ex and transformational experiences because all this leads to adoption right and if you have adoption you maximize value and if you don't get value it is difficult to kind of continue programs and get successes in your Solutions so you know like going back to the theme of our federal Forum here today transformation accelerated part of it is the experience and part all leading towards adoption and maximizing your value I would like to extend thanks to both Pam and John for you know great experiences that they have shared with us and hope we can take some of this away and go on our journey towards the transformation experiences that we need so thank you all thank you [Applause]