foreign hey good afternoon everyone and welcome to the digital government Institute workshop on elevating public sector customer experience my name is John Loveless and I want to show gratitude to DGI for allowing me and my colleague the time to have a discussion with you around redesigning a customer experience strategy on the stage I have my esteemed colleague Kevin Adler with me to bring his experience to discussion Kevin please take a brief moment to introduce yourself in servicenow thank you John hello everybody my name is Kevin Adler and I've been supporting different federal agencies around the Beltway and around the globe for about 20 years uh for improving their CX their customer experience strategy and I'm pleased to be able to join John Loveless and chat with you today at this event thank you Kevin Uh Kevin whenever we're redesigning or changing any aspect of any operations within an agency we really have to take a look at the people processes and Technology whenever people are involved in change you'll have to take a look at the culture of the organization here's a quick quote from our good friend Dr ire on how to cultivate cult you know culture and have change in our organization and the change really starts at the top going digital is a mindset it's a culture change it's about how we can fundamentally change how we operate as an organization through transformative digital Technologies empowering our Workforce and re-engineering our rigid institutional processes to be more agile so I really love this quote Kevin and it really just talks about how digital transformation and culture are really hand to hand and from that standpoint digital transformation and customer experience go hand in hand as well um over the next 15 minutes we're going to walk through a few examples of agencies that we have helped redesign their customer experiences but first I want to take a moment to discuss three of the major ingredients that you need to use to position yourself for success so Kevin in our conversations with forward-thinking public sector customer service leaders I've heard consistently that they want to transform their business and deliver a superior end-to-end customer experience and to do this you really need we really need to focus on three underlying uh service operations in addition to front-end customer engagement operations are where the work gets done so first it should always be easy and effortless for your customers to get service from you when they have a common request such as a password reset it should be automated and available as a self-service option your customers should shouldn't need to call you they can simply click a button and the services instantaneously delivered to them anytime anywhere second your customers should enjoy a seamless experience many times fixing customers issues required work to be done in other parts of the company by connecting teams and orchestrating workflows across departments and systems you can ensure this work is properly tracked to closure with full accountability this way your customers enjoy a consistent outcomes and their issues are permanently fixed and and third but not least your customers shouldn't be the ones contacting you about the issues in the first place if you're proactively monitoring your customer services and analyzing Trends You can predict issues and fix them before your customers are affected so by moving from a reactive service model to one that is proactive you will improve customer experience so what is this by focusing on effortless connected and proactive customer service your customers enjoy a better experience leading to consistently High customer satisfaction you're also able to reduce support costs while improving the quality of your products of service so Kevin let's take the time now to run through some some public sector example some some public sector examples where we've been able to provide these three ingredients to help them with their CX strategy sounds good John that's a great opening uh so these are some of the um our key leaders in the public sector space we've got some state and local examples this is the state of Tennessee portal that is live on the internet today everybody can go explore it for themselves and see the Simplicity you said the ease and and uh of effort to get answers from the state to request products and services from the state you'll see they put up a portal that has a search gazetteer it has live chat embedded and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to access any of their business or Services their motor vehicle services it's really really simple and it's clean and it's well done so that's one example that always shines in my in my eyes from an education perspective of smart folks at Stanford University stood up a similar portal but theirs looks different than state of Tennessee's and that's one of the nice things about these customers all leveraging service now is they probably already have service now running in their environment today John so it makes it much simpler and a quicker time to value for them to stand up a new portal that's external facing that's secure and allows users who are unauthenticated like this example here or authenticated to log in to request information from payroll that could be a staff request it could be a vendor request or students or effective faculty or any of the administrative folks around Stanford who support vetting organization doing it through a self-service portal has saved them tremendous amounts of Cycles money resources and help them really focus on that student and faculty experience so this is a really good example as well that we always like to showcase when we talk about civilian entities at the federal government the fish and wildlife service stood up a portal again they've got a tremendous amount invested in workflow automation which helps them with processing the requests that they have from their constituents for getting e-permits and getting them uh easily and quickly and routed and through stakeholders and approved so this is another great portal which uh our customers have stood up we'll take a moment now and really look at one of our DOD entities our one of our larger customers around the globe had a challenge John with managing the housing for their members for their uh soldiers and their soldiers families and they didn't have a way to manage the requests from any of those families living in government provided housing around the globe so this is a worldwide solution uh in the past they used to have people come into a physical office and their family members would request that the roofs would would be repaired from leaks or the locks would be repaired that are broken or broken windows or black mold whatever issues were focused around the household experience that would either land on somebody's desk through a note or an email or a phone call or a sticky note there was no holistic capturing method to collecting and managing these requests so in a few um in a few months the this DOD entity was able to stand up a solution based on servicenow extending the workflows they already had in place to support this new use case which was basically worldwide housing management and the ability for all of those impacted users in this case the soldiers and their families to provide feedback to provide the ability to have a photograph submitted and to be aware of when that technician is coming to fix the black mold or the broken locks or the uh the the cracked Windows any of those service related issues has really elevated The Experience not only for this DOD entity but for the soldiers and families that they serve so that's a really really good example and we'll uncover and unpack a few details within the next few uh few minutes so in this one John we'll talk about how they created the consumer grade experience and this DOD entity did it by focusing really on uh where do you start you've got a lot of problems to to resolve you need to focus and you need to focus exclusively so you have success which drives more success so the ability is for them to focus on what processes were they looking to automate and the results was that they wanted to being able to collect those requests for maintenance related activities from their community of users their soldiers and their families they wanted them to be able to use any uh tablet or smartphone that's out there today they wanted to make it easy and frictionless like you mentioned earlier so again by focusing on their stakeholders they were able to determine how they wanted to interact with those stakeholders and the results was that they focused again on who are they serving their customers were there soldiers and families and they wanted the ability for them to make make it simple make it consumer friendly using that device that they they already have in there in their in their possession so when we help them understand what makes this a consumer a great experience when you dig into the details and this is the fun part it's really everything that we as private citizens are used to today connecting with the service provider providing feedback making a request having the ability to listen to that feedback is key the ability to look what if we wanted to upload a photograph of an issue and we'll show you that in a few seconds and then interact how frictionless is that interaction between the agency the organization providing services and those that are requesting services and then when updates are made either to the request or to the user who's providing the request how do you communicate eloquently back and forth and then when all of this is done at the end of the transaction how do you evaluate the success and you can see that customers expect this same level of consumer grade experience for every uh transaction with with a public sector entity we mentioned earlier listening is key there's a lot of components to listening you've got two types of data to collect you've got structured data and you have unstructured data and so service now is able to collect structured data using pull-down menus drop down menus Etc but we're also able to collect unstructured data as well giving users the ability to free uh free form fields for them to fill out or submit photographs those all become uh ways to listen to what the customer is saying and then if you want to see what the customer is saying from there for uh viewpoint on the far left of this screen you can actually see there's some images of a fire uh fire alarm that's that's that needs some attention a fence post is broken out in the fields you've got a picture of an HVAC ventilation system that's really really hot on a summer day and needs to be corrected and then finally on the far right of the screen John we're able to help customers see and so for uh for yourself a picture's worth a thousand words so those roof tiles that have black mold or that have issues with them they need to be corrected so when the technicians receive these images wow it makes a lot of sense I need to get out there right away and fix that fire sprinkler that's a life safety issue or whatever other issues at Bay so seeing the ability to uh to see the customer's point of view is key to success and then of course how do you want to interact with those customers do you want to collect information uh seamlessly and digitally do you want to use the Ability for the customer's email system to work do you want to give them an option for text messaging do you want to use a live chat however the customer wants to speak to you in whichever Channel that's the best way to listen to the customer and interact with the customer and then finally it's all about trust and transparency so the ability to uh continually be engaged with the customer to give them the ability to provide input the ability to receive input and then update input so when you're scheduling something for next Tuesday at 2 30 to be repaired that dryer vent as an example does that work for the customer and what if they need to shift that technician's appointment from Tuesday to Wednesday the following week making it transparent making it very frictionless and making it very easy is how you build credibility trust and confidence with the customer that you're focused on their needs and solving it and then once you did solve it how do you evaluate it so every keystroke every Mouse click every data segment that servicenow has access to that's where you can really drive home to leadership the value that you're providing focusing on that CX engagement so you can provide all of the mean times resolution all of the key performance indicators and all of that feedback from the customer's perspective goes into delivering reports to help the agency or the organization take a giant leap forward to improving their their CX so with that that's a good overview of um of the experience that we did for a large DOD entity John I'll swing it back to you for some key takeaways wow Kevin that was uh a mouthful there I really appreciate you giving us that update um some of the key takeaways that I that I heard was culture always needs to be evaluated on any type of operation that's going to be uh any different type of strategy that's going to be changed uh it needs to customer experience needs to be easy seamless and proactive uh listening is key to the customer obviously and then transparency with customers with live updates to make sure that the there's accountability and then obviously reporting to execs uh using the kpis and the different dashboards that is that's very key so with that DJI I'd love to thank you for allowing us to have 15 minutes uh with our customers to discuss this customer experience strategy and I hope to hear from from you really soon thank you