“Federal agencies have plenty of room to improve their collective customer experience, but some—even amid a pandemic—have met challenges with agility, innovation and improvements that lay groundwork for other agencies.”
“Speaking Tuesday at the Customer Experience Summit, representatives from three key federal agencies—the IRS and Veterans Affairs and Agriculture departments—shared how they’ve improved service delivery over the past year. One key theme shared by each federal official was improving trust.”
“Jim Clifford, director of the IRS’ Taxpayer First Act Office, said the IRS customer experience strategy focused on ‘delivering a higher degree of trust’ among Americans, ‘especially aimed at segments of the population who do not trust or fear the government.’ Clifford said 2020 represented ‘multidimensional challenges,’ as COVID-19 forced tens of thousands of IRS employees to work remotely despite increased mission load in the form of issuing 200 million economic payments through the government’s stimulus package…”
“Margarita Devlin, principal deputy undersecretary for benefits at VA, said the agency responsible for providing care to millions of veterans annually has taken a series of steps in recent years to improve service delivery. One of them was both simple and profound, she said…”
“Simchah Suveyke-Bogin, chief customer experience officer at Agriculture, lauded the success of the Farmers.gov portal for Agriculture’s stakeholders, an abundance of which are actual farmers. The agency, she said, spent a lot of time with researchers, farm service personnel and farmers and producers in ensuring the product had a human-centered design…” Read the full article here.
Source: 3 Ways Agencies Can Improve Customer Experience – By Frank Konkel, October 6, 2020. Nextgov.
