Time for a Change

Introduction

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With improvements in commercial services setting high expectations from the public, the federal government is in the midst of a major push to improve customer service.

The administration has made the issue a top priority, and Congress has introduced several pieces of legislation with provisions that include establishing customer experience standards, mandating mobile-friendly government websites and using other ways to enhance customers’ interactions with government. In recent budget guidance, the Office of Management and Budget released a framework that establishes a standardized approach for collecting customer feedback and assessing maturity across government to help agencies improve the customer experience.

The push from the White House and Congress has helped drive attention to the issue, but real progress will require agency leaders to untangle a complicated web of decades-old systems and business processes that underpin how government delivers services to the public. And leaders must shift agency culture so it centers more on the customer – including both customers in the public, and employees, who are customers of internal agency services.

For example, although federal agencies collect and report on many performance measures that are aligned with strategic goals, those measures typically focus on agency activities, such as the number of benefit applications processed, rather than customer impact and mission outcomes. And those measures rarely reflect customers’ perspectives. Of the 78 performance goals federal departments and agencies list on performance.gov, only two are measured based on citizen feedback, both by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Although not all of government’s performance goals should rely on how customers assess their experiences, more agencies should be incorporating feedback when evaluating performance, making decisions about needed improvements or designing new initiatives.

In this whitepaper, the Partnership for Public Service and Accenture Federal Services examine how agencies can transform their business practices to enhance citizen services. We highlight strategies federal departments and agencies are using to rethink traditional ways of doing business, and offer three key practices as models that can be replicated in other agencies.

The first practice, highlighted through work at the Department of Agriculture, is establishing a detailed, department-wide strategy for improving customer experience based on input from staff, front-line employees and customers.

The second practice, from the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, is transforming culture by expanding employees’ perceptions of who their customers are and what they expect, and investing in change management activities to help employees adapt to these shifts.

The third practice, demonstrated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, is designating improving customers’ trust as the agency’s top performance measure to ensure that receiving and acting on customer feedback is central to everything it does.

In all these cases, the organizations aimed to substantially improve how they deliver services by reexamining longstanding approaches and business practices from the customer perspective.

The secretary made it a top priority to put the customer first and established USDA’s first centralized Office of Customer Experience with Joe Doyle at the helm. Doyle, the former owner of a successful 240-store retail chain, has decades of experience with private sector customers and also led Georgia’s Office of Customer Service when Perdue was governor.

One of leadership’s challenges in revamping USDA’s programs and services is the size and complexity of the organization. The department is composed of 17 agencies that operate more than 385 very diverse programs, and about 90 percent of employees live and work outside of the D.C. area. “One of the first things we learned was how much we didn’t know,” Doyle said. USDA leadership turned to employees to identify challenges and seek recommendations for ways to improve processes and deliver a better customer experience.

While seeking employee feedback on customer experience improvements is a strategy many agencies use, USDA also then developed a detailed system and plan for capturing, organizing and acting on that feedback. Perdue asked each agency in the department to create a customer experience improvement plan to identify challenges that could be addressed in fiscal 2019 at little to no cost, and without legislative changes. The plans are employee-led and meant to foster a bottom-up approach for identifying, addressing and improving agencies’ customer experience efforts. The focus is on making the department faster, friendlier and easier to interact with, including speeding up service delivery, simplifying access to USDA programs and people and creating a culture of courteous and helpful employees.

“In general, we didn’t take the approach that we had a burning platform or that there was something horrendous that we needed to fix,” Doyle said. “It is a more holistic, cultural transformation. We are driving everyone, every day, to improve what they do, making sure the customer is in every conversation. It is something that is going to live beyond just one project.”

Each agency in USDA appointed full-time customer experience champions to create the customer experience improvement plans. Agency leaders appointed these champions based on criteria such as proven leadership ability, problem-solving skills, trusted relationships with senior agency leadership and “a bias for action,” according to Doyle.

“We didn’t take the approach that we had a burning platform or that there was something horrendous that we needed to fix. It is a more holistic, cultural transformation.”

Customer Service Coordinator, USDA

The champions represent a wide range of positions and disciplines across USDA, collectively brining a breadth of experiences and insight to draw on. Of the 40 champions, a third are from outside Washington, D.C., representing USDA offices in places such as Idaho, Hawaii and Alabama. Some are scientists or policy experts, while others have experience in business functions such as communication, finance and human resources. For example, Curtis Elke, Idaho’s state conservationist, is the customer experience champion for USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service. He has been at his agency for almost two decades, in positions in five states and multiple divisions, starting as an entry-level soil conservationist.

In addition to the work being led by the Office of Customer Experience, the department also is the first agency to partner with the General Services Administration’s Centers of Excellence, an initiative the White House launched in 2017 to develop, test and spread innovative practices in five focus areas, including customer experience.

In 2018, the customer experience center of excellence partnered with USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation mission area to improve the farm loan experience for producers. The center of excellence is co-led by a USDA and GSA representative to ensure each organization’s perspectives are represented. “For me, that is the unique piece the COEs [Centers of Excellence] offer,” said Simchah Suveyke-Bogin, the team lead for the customer experience center of excellence for GSA. “We are not doing work for USDA, we are partnering and doing the work with them.”

Check out an example customer journey map developed by the USDA and GSA’s Centers of Excellence.

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Agriculture and GSA are partnering on a plan to improve the direct farm loan program, administered through the Farm Service Agency. USDA provides loans to farmers and ranchers on family-run farms and ranches who cannot obtain commercial credit from a bank or other lender. In partnership with the center of excellence team, USDA gathered information to understand the experience from the perspective of the farmers and ranchers who apply for loans.

Over three months, the team conducted more than 100 interviews at USDA offices across six states. First, they conducted interactive workshops with headquarters’ employees to get their perspectives on the direct loan process. The team then went into the field to compare headquarters’ perspectives with those of field office employees and farmers, ranchers and producers. Team members interviewed loan officers and observed their process for receiving and processing loan applications, and interviewed farmers to understand their point of view. “It was a great learning experience to see how people in D.C. felt about what was happening in the field and then bringing what employees in the field experienced back to D.C.” Suveyke-Bogin said.

Through this endeavor, both the center of excellence team and USDA tested employees’ long-held assumptions about the loan process and potential improvements. They had hypothesized that the biggest improvement would come from moving paper-based application forms and processes online. However, the team’s research showed that for both the loan officers and farmers, the in-person meetings provided benefits that went beyond filling out forms. In many cases, the loan officers would go to applicants’ farms and provide business consulting, connect farmers to conservationists and recommend other USDA services.

Producers would say, “I love when they came onto my farm. These people are more than just loan officers. They understand farming,” Suveyke-Bogin said.

The center of excellence team is working with Farm Service Agency leaders to incorporate findings from the team’s research into the agency’s customer experience improvement plans, Suveyke-Bogin added. The team is also working with the farmers.gov website development team to build digital tools that allow for valuable interactions between farmers and loan officers. One option the agency may explore in the future is to develop an online tool enabling loan officers and farmers to collaborate on loan applications. This would allow both the producer and loan officers to view, edit and update the document simultaneously until it is ready to be submitted by the producer.

Across the department, customer experience improvement plans will be required annually, with the aim of bolstering employees’ ability to serve customers better, according to Doyle. “The big winners are not only the customers, but also our own employees,” he said. “When energy, appreciation and respect come together, the employees become heroes in the eyes of their customers.”

Over the past several years, the organization, known as FIMA, has transformed by reorienting employees’ perceptions to view insurance policyholders as their primary customers, and focusing on improving those customers’ interactions.

After Hurricane Sandy flooded the Northeast in 2012, staff needed to better understand the needs of policyholders rather than concentrating mainly on relationships with insurance companies and other flood insurance program partners, according to Chelsea D’Angona, former deputy director of FIMA’s customer experience office.

“At that time, the program staff and leadership, like many in government, felt their primary duty was to act as good stewards of taxpayers’ money. Their mentality was to protect the National Flood Insurance Fund first, not the policyholder,” D’Angona said.

Over the past two and a half years, however, FIMA has implemented several major initiatives to transform the flood insurance program to provide simple, easy customer experiences that policyholders value and trust.

To start, FIMA leaders identified a small group of change agents who were willing to shake things up and drive improvements. The team included employees at all levels, and they began their work by framing an approach for gathering feedback on the current state of policyholder’s experiences.

The team then created customer journey maps to identify and visualize the steps policyholders go through when interacting with the organization, from shopping for flood insurance to applying for a policy to submitting an insurance claim after flooding.

Next, the team surveyed policyholders and conducted focus groups, interviews, and workshops with policyholders as well as other employees and program partners to get feedback on how they experience the steps in their customer journeys. They summarized their findings and presented initial recommendations to the entire organization.

Finally, the team developed a list of customer experience improvements based on the analysis and feedback. They narrowed and prioritized the suggested improvements, using a set of criteria that included potential impact, viability and required resources, to create a list of more than 30 initiatives.

Shortly after achieving consensus on the list of initiatives, FIMA established a customer experience office to catalyze the transformation, coordinate the projects, and drive performance. All of this work lead to a strong foundation for improving how FIMA aided policyholders in subsequent disasters that caused extensive flooding.

“Instead of primarily focusing on the fund, we focused on people.”

Former Deputy Director of Customer Experience, FIMA

During hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, FIMA launched several teams to address needs of policy holders during major floods, based on the initiatives on the list. One team’s mission was to combat rumors and misinformation circulating on social media so policyholders had the best, most current information. Another team was established to monitor and manage customer related strategic risks, for example analyzing how potential changes to the program’s authorizing legislation might affect policyholders.

With substantial changes happening quickly across the organization – FIMA was also relocating its offices and making changes to its organizational structure – FIMA’s customer experience office began to recognize the importance of change management to drive adoption and sustain the new customer-centered mindset. Through feedback sessions with staff, the customer experience team realized that leaders were asking employees to adjust too quickly without providing the support and engagement they needed to adapt and thrive in this new environment. So D’Angona’s team shifted its attention from driving rapid improvement to assessing employees’ experiences and their readiness to make changes.

“I would not overlook the importance of change management, which takes considerable resources and time. It paid dividends as we ramped up and reinvested time back into finding solutions that addressed customer concerns,” D’Angona said.

To help staff understand changes and why they were happening, leadership and the customer experience office developed a staff communication plan and a “call to action” to ensure staff at all levels understood the customer experience initiatives and the overall transformation.

Email updates sent from senior leaders every Monday highlighted new customer experience efforts and why they were important, as did segments of the monthly newsletter sent to FIMA’s workforce. Leaders conducted sessions with FIMA staff and external stakeholders to get their input and buy-in on significant changes, such as the claims journey redesign effort and a redesign of the program’s risk rating process.

D’Angona’s team also helped employees understand how their work is critical to the mission and directly supports disaster survivors. “It becomes hard for employees to be engaged if they don’t see tangible results,” she said.

FIMA leaders took an important step that is sometimes skipped in change management efforts – measuring how well the culture change sticks. They use an annual organizational health survey to assess how well staff are adapting to changes. In just one year, the organization had a seven-point increase in the “customer focus” score on this staff survey, from 53 out of 100 in 2016 to 60 in 2017. Leaders also saw increases in the percentage of staff saying they “were actively engaged in the customer-focused reset” and “understood the role they play in transforming [the program] into a simple and easy experience that customers value and trust.”

D’Angona summarized FIMA’s transformation with a simple principle. “Instead of primarily focusing on the fund, we focused on people,” she said.

To gain a deeper understanding of the veterans’ experience and inform the improvements needed, the department developed a comprehensive customer experience data framework to identify, collect and analyze data on how veterans experienced their services. “All of our projects and enterprise-wide initiatives start with the premise that we listen to the voice of our customer,” said Lynda Davis, the VA’s chief veterans experience officer.

The framework uses five components to assess the veterans’ experiences from multiple perspectives, which together provide robust information that staff analyze to identify trends, gaps and insights. The first component measures how veterans feel about the VA at an enterprise-wide level and involves surveying veterans every quarter about whether they received the care or services they needed; if it was easy to receive care; if veterans felt like valued customers; and whether veterans trust the VA to fulfill its mission.

The second component measures how veterans feel about specific services. This in