employee engagement – GovCX Contact Center Professionals (GovCXP)

September 15, 2019September 16, 2019 Rosetta Carrington Lue Business Processes, Connected City, Connected Customers, Customer Experience Management, digital innovation, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Strategy, Technology

Why Do You Need a Government Chief Customer Experience Officer?

In the past few years, we’ve seen the emergence of Government Chief Customer Experience Officers, a new kind of executive in the Mayor, City Manager, or Secretary’s cabinet. While this role is growing more and more popular, there are still lingering questions about where it is necessary for a government agency. As a former Chief Customer Experience Officer for the City of Philadelphia and Senior Contact Center Advisor for the Veteran Administration, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I agree with the role’s necessity.

While it can be argued that government agencies are relatively concerned with customers to want and needs, efforts can become fragmented across an agency through its departments or leaders over time. The financial department, for instance, could be modeled to provide an excellent customer experience but limited resources, staffing changes or other department-specific events could shift priorities. Now take this example and multiply it across each and every department or leader within an agency, each with an equal chance to lose sight of the customer due to unique circumstances. This is why a Chief Customer Experience Officer is essential, to drive customer-centric initiatives and to coordinate efforts across departments so that these initiatives stay intact.

Marchai Bruchey, the Chief Customer Officer of Thunderhead describes the need for coordinated efforts for successful customer experience strategy:

“It is really important to look at the customer from across the organization, because as a customer if I am calling my bank and have a conversation with a call center agent after having just finished a web transaction, I would like that agent to know about this activity. If they know about all the conversations I have had then they will have a different dialogue with me than just having insight into one channel. Customer service doesn’t own the customer. The customer owns the company. And that means we touch them across it.”

In the public sector, like a major city government, such coordination is vital to maintaining a high level of customer experience. We have tried to facilitate this coordination through the Administration’s Department Customer Experience Officers Program, naming specific DCXO’s for each department. While this effort helps to keep customer experience as a priority across the administration, the Chief Customer Experience Officer guides the actual effort, making sure that it too stays completely customer-centric and does not waiver.

The most important takeaway is that there absolutely cannot be silos for customer experience and service throughout an agency. Customer experience needs to be “silo-less.” A Chief Customer Experience Officer can help, initiate and coordinate to create the absolute best experience for customers, across an agency, whatever their experience might be.

What have your experiences been with having (or not having) a designated executive for customer experience?

July 23, 2019September 12, 2019 Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, Connected Customers, CRM, Customer Experience Management, customer service, digital innovation, employee engagement, Human Resources, Local Government, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology

Government Contact Center Customer Experiences First Step

Who needs to conduct an annual contact center audit and assessments? Anyone who needs to understand how to improve their customer’s digital experience and the organization’s service delivery performance. Whether they manage a team, offer organizational help to team managers or are an industry body in search of industry benchmarking, an assessment tool can help you figure out how to improve your government customer experience delivery, reduce operational costs and increase employee engagement.

Through the completion of the contact center audit, you can ensure that the organization has a good understanding of the current state of the operation. The audit allows you to examine the contact center maturity and performance in contrast to ‘best practice’ centers globally.

This creates the baseline and context against which the contact center operations can be viewed and assessed. The execution of the audit by surfacing issues and/or concerns is an essential step in ensuring the success of the contact center operations.

Audit categories include:

1. Technology Review – All digital channels, operating technology (i.e. CRM) and telephony within the center, the effectiveness of technology, it’s utilization, scalability, interoperability, new technology opportunities including specifically any required telephony upgrade and ROI calculations.

2. Operations Management – Process improvement opportunities, workflow process opportunities, automation opportunities, change management, employee and customer satisfaction, measurement and reporting.

3. Compliance Management – Awareness and understanding of applicable rules, regulations, and standards. Policies, processes, and procedures for ensuring the operation is and can document compliance.

4. Operational Alignment of the contact center to the business goals, especially related to desired patient journey both within and outside of the normal center operating hours, and presenting suggested approaches and results.

5. Human Capital Management – Recruiting, Hiring, Job Descriptions, Skills Mapping, Workforce Management, and Optimization, Forecasting, Scheduling, Training, Coaching, Succession Planning, and Quality Assurance.

Outcome: After the completion of the audit and assessment, you should expect a clear direction, in the shape of detailed reports to empower you to deliver better customer experience and give you a precise idea of where your organization stands in the world map if you also include a benchmarking tool.

Author Rosetta Carrington Lue is a pioneer in the field of Government Customer Experience Management and has devoted an entire career to bettering the lives of everyone around her through her work. She is right at home as the CEO of GovCX Professionals (www.govcxprofessionals).

July 22, 2019September 12, 2019 Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, Customer Experience Management, customer service, digital innovation, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Performance Management

How To Exceed Your Government CX Contact Center via Benchmarking

Background story:

I recently met with Cynthia, a Senior Government Contact Center Leader, who was at her wits end trying to manage the agency’s initiative to transform and modernize the contact center as part of her performance expectations. Cynthia was familiar with the buzz words around “customer experience” but was struggling to decide how to prioritize and build a business case for change. She didn’t know what “specific problem she was trying to solve” but knew she had to show she was doing something to improve the customer experience. “Journey mapping, multi or omnichannel communications, CRM, IVR, data visualization, AI, knowledge management, etc. What should I do?”

My Response: Step back and begin with a Contact Center Audit, Assessment, and Benchmarking initiative to roadmap where you should start the contact center’s transformation and modernization journey,

I explained to Cynthia that it’s critical to understand the current contact center customer experience environment and the future (vision) environment to identify gaps in the operations. In addition to understanding customer experience operational gaps in the contact center, benchmarking other government operations to improve their customer’s digital experience and agency’s service delivery performance.

Let’s discuss why benchmarking is important

For an agency contact center to transform and modernize, there is a need to evaluate the performance against that of other government contact center establishments. Although a government may not be in competition with regards to the citizens it cares for, there is a need to benchmark the performance of a contact center against another.

As such, government contact centers can quantitatively evaluate the difference in performance level with other reputable call center agencies. Consequently, government contact centers can set customer experience goals and objectives which can serve as motivation for employees to work to the highest standard.

The importance of benchmarking government contact centers includes:

Evaluate the success of your customer experience improvement initiatives: What is the point of making improvements in certain areas and not having to know whether it was successful? Benchmarking helps to create a status quo towards which the success of a government contact center is measured against customer service standards and to understand your position against world best practice.
Gain an insight into other government contact center standard practices: A government contact center trying to compare its success with that of a corporate contact center is futile. It is a lot more beneficial to know what other governments are doing, especially those setting the pace. The failures and successes of a government contact center may help others learn and improve their policies and procedures.
Rate customer experience channels performance objectively: Conducting customer surveys and using certain operational metrics speaks volumes about the performance of an organization. However, it is not enough since a government contact center may not be performing up to international standards. Hence, benchmarking leads government contact centers to rate their performance about similar organizations, rather than having the performance score based on internal assessment tools alone. The findings from a study indicate that institutions that pay more attention to great customer experience will have a 30-50% more chance to get recommended by its customers. This metric is subjective and it is derived by requesting that customers complete a survey where answers have scores ranging from 1-5, 1-10 or Very Satisfied – Not satisfied.

I also recommended for Cynthia to work independently certified government customer experience professional. They bring industry experience and knowledge to the table, enabling her to navigate the assessment process in record time by supporting management. They are experts at identifying and anticipating opportunities for growth, staff development, cost reductions, increased productivity and technology improvement within your organization. Ultimately leading to cohesion within teams and customer service delivery support, they add tangible value to the assessment process.

Next Blog: What’s Included In A Government Audit and Assessment Report

July 2, 2019September 12, 2019 Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, Communications, Connected City, CRM, Customer Experience Management, customer service, digital innovation, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Local Government, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology, user design, website

Using Human Centered Design for Government Digital Transformation

Let’s be clear about my position – government will better serve all stakeholders by establishing a focus to oversee the design and implementation of a human-centered design-centric digital strategy.

The Business Case for Using HCD:

Streamlines, integrates, and scales websites and call centers consistently over time,
Takes a holistic, iterative approach to prioritizing improvements across channels,
Maintains a mobile-experience first philosophy (people seeking information often use mobile devices first because they want information immediately, or rely on mobile exclusively because it is what they can afford),

Digital Customer Experience Values and Benefits:

Uses clear, concise, and consistent language and messaging across all channels,
Identifies and responds to key touchpoints in a stakeholder’s journey,
Establishes a feeling of trust by providing consistent experiences across channels to different stakeholders, and
Firmly focuses on the future by laying the groundwork to integrate social media and emerging technologies in later phases of the project.

I am a staunch believer and GovCX Practitioner who understands leading a human-centered design change initiative requires vision and broad oversight to bring stakeholders, products, technical processes, and communication into alignment.

Jane – Typical Government Customer:

For example, picture Jane, a retiree who needs help. She goes to one website on her phone to get information fast, but it doesn’t help. Later she visits another site on her laptop and can see it better, but finds additional information, organized in a new way, and described with a different language.

Jane doesn’t know what to do or trust, so she tries a call center looking for a person to talk to instead. The wait times are long because so many others are having the same problems. When she finally gets through, the call center staff wants to help but they talk about services and options in yet another way.

Jane is distressed by her experience across siloed channels. She encounters disconnected technologies, has to translate between different language use, and finds that information is inconsistently organized or even offered to leave her frustrated and miserable. The call center staff who takes her call can hear that misery as it overflows into their conversation making the staffer’s job harder, the call longer, and both the financial and emotional costs higher for both.

Each time Jane’s journey plays out for another taxpayer or call center staffer, taxpayers lose confidence in the government agency and increase the costs of call center operations.

A single focus and oversight for government Contact Centers and the internet presence is a logical first step towards an improved Customer experience. Needed research must be conducted across channels and changes prioritized coherently across all platforms to maximize results. If the system is not treated as a whole, customer experience will continue to be fragmented and frustrating no matter how many isolated improvements are made over time.

A seamless experience requires a consistent approach to technological solutions, human needs, and organizational responses. The goal is to inspire taxpayer confidence and government efficiency by making it easy to start with a website, reach out to a call center if needed, and then complete tasks on the web when they are ready. In the future, integrating social media will increase responsiveness and better serve millennials and future generations.

A robust online database of Frequently Asked Questions can enhance customer experience based on insights from web analytics and call center topics. Web analytics and the call center knowledge management technology can be used to identify frequently accessed data, searches that come up empty, and how often users access particular information. In-depth interviews with call center personnel can shape resource allocation and better prepare them to address complex situations since the basics are covered in a searchable database.

Starting with aggregated website and call center data creates a solid foundation for human-centered research to address persistent pain points across channels then effectively design and deliver satisfying stakeholder experiences.

What if Jane went to a central website and found the basic information she needed quickly and easily? If she still wasn’t sure what to do in her situation, she could reach out to a call center. When she did, her wait time would be shorter since more people were finding what they needed on a streamlined easily searchable site that highlights frequently asked questions. Jane wouldn’t be so upset when she connected with a staff member, her questions could be answered more quickly, costs would go down, and Jane would regain confidence in the government agency. Later when it worked for her schedule, she could fill out any required forms on the website and get immediate confirmation that they were submitted. Now when Jane talks about the government agency she shares her experience. I get help when I need it, I get things done on my schedule, and I trust that the government agency has my back.

Conclusion

Integrating processes, products, services, and content in an organization like a government agency takes time, vision, and leadership. Consolidating oversight with the right vision offers the best possible chance to successfully transition the taxpayers to a coherent seamless experience.

About me: I am a pioneer in the field of Government Customer Experience Management and have devoted an entire career to bettering the lives of everyone around me through my work. I am right at home as the CEO of GovCX Professionals where I am able to spend all my time focusing on establishing government and their partners with a building a welcoming, innovative, and engaging government customer service experience.

February 18, 2019September 13, 2019 Rosetta Carrington Lue customer service, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology

Improving customer experience to enhance performance in government

What could happen if government viewed certain public sector challenges through the lens of customer experience? By changing the way people interact with a process rather than focusing solely on the process itself, agencies can broaden the range of available solutions.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www2.deloitte.com

“The experience begins the moment a customer contemplates buying a book, and doesn’t end until she’s finished reading it and, if it’s really good, recommended it to her friends.

Customer service, on the other hand, is narrowly focused on the actual transaction of buying the book only.”

October 25, 2016 Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, digital innovation, employee engagement, internet, Strategy, Technology, Uncategorized, user design, website

Bringing Government Agency Contact Centers and the Internet Together for a Seamless Customer Experience

Taxpayers often turn to the government when they are overwhelmed and stressed out by personal circumstances. A fragmented experience across government websites compounds their distress both increasing the burden on call center staff and the cost of meeting taxpayers needs. A consistent, thoughtfully designed experience (starting with websites and contact centers) will make a tremendous difference in the lives of taxpayers and government employees.

The government agency will better serve all stakeholders by establishing a focus to oversee the design and implementation of a human-centered design centric strategy that:

identifies and responds to key touchpoints in a stakeholder’s journey
streamlines, integrates, and scales websites and call centers consistently over time
takes a holistic, iterative approach to prioritizing improvements across channels
maintains a mobile experience first philosophy (people seeking information often
use mobile devices first because they want information immediately, or rely on mobile exclusively because it is what they can afford)
uses clear, concise, and consistent language and messaging across all channels
establishes a feeling of trust by providing consistent experiences across channels to different stakeholders firmly focuses on the future by laying the groundwork to
integrate social media and emerging technologies in later phases of the project

Leading a human-centered design change initiative requires vision and broad oversight to bring stakeholders, products, technical processes, and communication into alignment.

Picture Jane, a retiree who needs help. She goes to one website on her phone to get information fast, but it doesn’t help. Later she visits another site on her laptop and can see it better, but finds additional information, organized in a new way, and described with different language.

Jane is distressed by her experience across siloed channels. She encounters disconnected technologies, has to translate between different language use, and finds that information is inconsistently organized or even offered — leaving her frustrated and miserable. The call center staff who takes her call can hear that misery as it overflows into their conversation making the staffer’s job harder, the call longer, and both the financial and emotional costs higher for both.

Each time Jane’s journey plays out for another taxpayer or call center staffer, taxpayers lose confidence in the government agency and increase the costs of call center operations.

A robust online database of Frequently Asked Questions can enhance customer experience based on insights from web analytics and call center topics. Web analytics and the call center knowledge management technology can be used to identify frequently accessed data, searches that come up empty, and how often users access particular information. In depth interviews with call center personnel can shape resource allocation and better prepare them to address complex situations since the basics are covered in a searchable database.

What if Jane went to a central website and found the basic information she needed quickly and easily? If she still wasn’t sure what to do in her situation, she could reach out to a call center. When she did, her wait time would be shorter since more people were finding what they needed on a streamlined easily searchable site that highlights frequently asked questions. Jane wouldn’t be so upset when she connected with a staff member, her questions could be answered more quickly, costs would go down, and Jane would regain confidence in the government agency. Later when it worked for her schedule, she could fill out any required forms on the website and get immediate confirmation that they were submitted. Now when Jane talks about the government agency she shares her experience — I get help when I need it, I get things done on my schedule, and I trust that the government agency has my back.

October 8, 2016October 8, 2016 Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Communications, customer service, employee engagement, Uncategorized

Using Human-Centered Design (HCD) Approach to Improve Your Government Contact Center’s Experience

Every interaction the taxpayer has with the government is a touch point that shapes their impression on the quality of service received based on a positive or negative experience. The contact centers for government are an integrated platform that provides taxpayers and their family members with accurate information about services and information that can provide taxpayers with their desired requests. Rather than government leaders improving solutions that seem accurate to taxpayers, there has been a commitment to creating ideas that better meet taxpayer’s needs by developing processes and tools tailored to their specific needs. To understand the needs of taxpayers, contact center leaders are standardizing the approach by using the human-centered design (HDC) technique. To best serve the taxpayers and create that emotional connection immediately, government leaders must understand the needs of the taxpayers by hearing about the good and bad experiences occurring with every single touch point occurring.

Human-centered design thinkers use a tool called a design artifact (physical model) to aid in communicating, exploring, and defining solutions. Government leaders have created a unique design artifact, the customer journey map, to allow leadership and employees to gain a deeper perspective of what the taxpayer is experiencing and feeling at each stage of their life journey. The results of honing in on the needs of the taxpayers will provide seamless, emotionally connected interactions to events that have been identified (by using HCD), as “moments that matter.” The “moments that matter” are moments that can have a significant impact on the taxpayer’s experience that directly connects to government’s contact centers. Creating that immediate emotional connection with the caller is essential in ensuring the experience is a not only positive but meets the needs of the taxpayer.

Government contact centers have historically struggled with gaining positive taxpayer’s satisfaction due to long wait times, inability to get connected, and inaccurate information all contributing to the lack of trust in government’s ability to care for them. To build confidence, make a connection, and provide accurate information, government leaders must understand thoroughly what makes a taxpayers tick and ensure the communication is clear in the minds of the taxpayers and the service rendered yields a positive experience. When looking through the lens of the human-centered design approach, government leaders can gain insight through direct observation or surveys of what the taxpayer likes or dislikes, what was confusing or what was clear, and figure out how to develop an internal process that can meet their needs. Improving the process, also known as lean management, is a critical output to the problems defined when taking the perspective of taxpayers into consideration.

October 2, 2016October 2, 2016 Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Communications, Community Engagement Programs, Connected Customers, Customer Experience Management, customer service, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Performance Management, recognition, social media, Strategy

Why You Should Celebrate 2016 National Customer Service Week Oct 3rd – 9th!

In the words of Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin, “Well done is better than well said.” The idea of customer service is often reserved to describe interaction with stores, restaurants, and other organizations in the private sector. Rarely do we hear people say “Wow, I had a great experience dealing with the staff at any government agency!” Fortunately, those outside of government might be surprised at how seriously excellence in service delivery is taken in the public sector.

Let’s take a look at national Customer Service Week which was created by 1992 by the President of the United States, citing the value of service excellence in a free market economy.

The President’s proclamation said:

A business will do a better job of providing high-quality goods and services by listening to its employees and by empowering them with opportunities to make a difference. Customer service professionals work in the front lines where a firm meets its customers; where supply meets demand. With responsive policies and procedures and with simple courtesy, customer service professionals can go a long way toward ensuring customer satisfaction and eliciting the next round of orders and purchases. The Congress, by Senate Joint Resolution 166, has designated the week of October 4 through October 10, 1992, as “National Customer Service Week” and requested the President to issue a proclamation in observance of this week.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the week of October 4 through October 10, 1992, and the first week of October in subsequent years, as National Customer Service Week. I invite all Americans to observe this week with appropriate programs and activities.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eighth day of October, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-two, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and seventeenth.

George H. Bush

Across the country, including the federal government agencies, there is a movement to improve the delivery of information and service to those in need.

During the first week of October 2016, they are making Benjamin Franklin proud by not just talking about customer service but actually doing something (many things actually) to make sure our customers are properly “served.”