Page 20 - FCW, November/December 2019

Customer Experience
GSA tackles
CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE experience
ANAHITA REILLY

GSA’s CX leader discusses the agency’s comprehensive approach to improving the customer and employee experience
How does GSA approach the customer experience when it has such a wide variety of customers?
We focus a lot of time and energy on getting a better understanding of our customers.
It may sound simplistic and obvious, but
it’s a critical thing to think about when focusing on improving the customer experience. GSA generally serves four types of customers: agencies that are buying
from us or working with the buildings side of the house, suppliers that are selling
to government, the public, and then the employees at GSA. Employee experience
is a very big part of what we think about when it comes to customer experience. The two are inextricably linked.
My office is centrally housed and reports to the deputy administrator of the agency, so we have visibility across all our business lines. This allows us to synthesize data across organizational silos and identify opportunities to improve customer-facing issues at the enterprisewide level. The
data that comes in through our Voice of the Customer program helps us depict our customer’s end-to-end experience with
the agency so that our program leaders
can think more clearly about what their customers need. Then we use tools like journey maps and user personas, which
are customer profiles, to further embed the customer into our business decisions.
We work to transform customer service beyond an individual transaction. We
like to think about the broader customer experience or the sum of an individual’s perceptions of his or her interactions with an organization. Whether it’s quantitative data from feedback, qualitative data from interviews or operational data such as number of transactions or dollars or time
spent, we pull all that together to get the entire picture of what’s happening with the customer and use that to continue to drive discussions and decisions.
One example is the federal marketplace initiative, where we’re essentially revolutionizing the way that buying and selling happens in government. We’re making it easy, modern and efficient because that’s what our customers and
our industry partners have told us they want. We’re using data and principles like human-centered design throughout the initiative to help inform how we design the future with our customers in mind.
How has GSA tackled the cultural changes associated with a focus on customer experience?
We don’t do change management as a separate work stream. It’s embedded in everything we do. And of course, it’s all about the people. We want to connect employees with customers and with business decisions in a way that is innate to the organization and works with the people and the culture.
To reinforce customer-centricity across all levels of the agency, we issue a quarterly enterprisewide customer experience
award to recognize outstanding employee behavior and actions that are inherently customer-centric. We run a monthly enterprisewide Customer Experience Community of Practice to bring together customer experience-minded professionals and have them educate one another
on what they’re doing on behalf of the customer and work across organizational silos.
Additionally, we facilitate human- centered design workshops across the
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