“Delivering on the promise to improve the Veterans and Employee Experiences”

In October of 2016, the VA kicked-off a new and aggressive activity aimed at making rapid, meaningful progress in support of several of the myVA Breakthrough Priorities: the Enterprise Contact Center Modernization Operations Hub, or Ops Hub.

Why The Ops Hub? Today, there are a number of important efforts taking place across the VA, and specifically within the Veterans Experience Office, which provide the foundation for a greatly improved Veteran and employee experience. The purpose of the Ops Hub is to leverage and integrate the valuable outputs from these efforts (along with other data collected from across the VA enterprise) to make impactful changes directed towards VA’s Enterprise Contact Center operations with a laser-focus on greatly increasing customer satisfaction.

What Is The Ops Hub? The Ops Hub is comprised of a dedicated team of government and contractor personnel whose sole focus is to perform daily analyses of key Contact Center performance data, develop recommendations based on the analyses, and implement a continual ‘backlog’ of improvement initiatives across the spectrum of Contact Center enterprise operations throughout the VA.

The Ops Hub follows a ‘command center’ model where a diverse range of Ops Hub experts are co-located, assigned specific functional areas (e.g., customer experience, workforce management, operations) and are empowered by a wide-range of data and tools. Data is key, and as such, the VEO has established a Customer Experience Data Warehouse that provides a rich set of unfiltered, raw Contact Center data. This data warehouse is the life blood of the Ops Hub’s day-to-day operations, allowing its experts to review detailed data on current Contact Center operations at both site and enterprise levels and to track performance of improvement initiatives.

To make sure we hit the mark with Veterans, the Ops Hub employs human-centered design (HCD) techniques in the execution of all of its activities. HCD ensures that Hub activities are tailored and targeted purposefully to maximize the value to the Veteran and employee. This includes working with Veterans and employees to understand their needs, experiences, and desires as to how VA can best serve their diverse needs.

How Are We Aligning to myVA Priorities? The Ops Hub directly addresses several key objectives across four of the myVA Breakthrough Priorities, namely —

• The Ops Hub Improves the Veteran Experience (Priority #1) by analyzing both qualitative data (e.g., Veteran and employee surveys) and quantitative data (e.g., number of calls blocked, time to answer call and provide resolution). The Ops Hub’s dedicated Customer Experience Management (CEM) team analyzes this data, provides recommendations for improvement, and assists in the implementation of solutions.
• Service to our Veterans is always top-priority, and as such, it is the Ops Hub’s daily operating mantra and it is how its success is ultimately measured. In the Contact Center business, the saying “a happy employee is a happy customer” holds particularly true.

The Ops Hub — ready to make a measurable, positive impact in service of our Veterans and employees alike!