Maturing CX Capabilities at the Department of Labor

A CASE STUDY

My roles

• Customer Experience Lead, GSA’s Centers of Excellence

• Business development

• Consultant

• Researcher

• Workstream lead

The Department of Labor asked Centers of Excellence (CoE) to help the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) improve the experiences of their many customers. I designed an engagement with three OWCP programs:

• The Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) program serves injured or ill federal employees. Beneficiaries of the program are Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, postal workers, office workers, emergency responders, forest rangers, air traffic controllers, firefighters, Capitol police officers, and many others.

• The Black Lung program supports coal miners, construction workers, and transportation workers who are regularly exposed to respirable coal mine dust and who have black lung disease.

• The Energy program serves current and former nuclear weapons workers who have been exposed to radiation or other toxic substances.

I led the team that interviewed program staff and leaders to better understand the programs’ services and talked to the customers who rely on program services. The team evaluated programs based on the CoE CX Maturity Model. (I designed the model to define capabilities based on core CX functions.)

The three programs have made progress in measurement capabilities, tracking customer satisfaction and collecting performance-based metrics for timeliness, but overall, they lack human-centered design and customer experience expertise. Collecting, analyzing and widely distributing customer-related data is also an area of potential growth.

Outcome

We collaborated with staff and leadership to develop strategies and tactics for getting each of the programs to the next level in the CX Maturity Model. Four primary strategies emerged:

• Share CX expertise across OWCP programs

• Share tools across OWCP programs

• Search engine optimization

• Help the programs with their own strategies and tactics

Reimagining Workforce Services for the Department of Labor

A CASE STUDY

My roles

• Customer Experience Lead, GSA’s Centers of Excellence

• Consultant

• Usability expert

• Workstream lead

COVID-19 killed more than a half million people in the U.S. by early 2021. Over 29 million had tested positive and the global pandemic triggered an economic recession. In response, the U.S. Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill to speed up the country's recovery. 

The Department of Labor (DOL) is responsible for the well being of U.S. wage earners and job seekers. The agency’s chief  innovation officer wanted the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to improve service delivery to the nation’s workforce. He reached out to GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) for help.

Solution: Research ETA customer needs and recommend foundational strategies and tactics.

I led the team that researched one of ETA’s longest standing digital tools, the CareerOneStop website. We collaborated with ETA leadership to transform findings into initiatives for improving the experiences of CareerOneStop customers and transforming how ETA provides its services.

My team’s activities included:

• Heuristic evaluation

• Usability testing

• Web traffic analysis

• Customer interviews

• American Job Center visits

Outcome

Our primary recommendations: 

• Create key performance indicators (KPIs) that track the experiences of customers

• Establish a customer research practice

• Adopt a product development approach

• Build continuous improvement capabilities instead of launching a redesign

Modernizing procurement

A CASE STUDY

My roles

• Customer Experience Lead, GSA’s Centers of Excellence

• Consultant

• Workstream lead

2.5 million federal retirees and survivors depend on Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Services to administer their benefits. Legal Administrative Specialists (LAS) adjudicated cases using the

FACES desktop app to determine benefits. For most cases, an LAS hand-entered information about the retiring federal employee based on paper records organized in a physical case file. The adjudication system depended on the LAS’s expert knowledge of retirement regulations and policies.

Both the FACES app and the “engine” that calculated benefits relied on technology that was no longer supported by manufacturers.

Solution: Jump-start OPM’s ability to contract and run modern design and development projects

I collaborated with stakeholders at all levels of OPM’s OCIO and Retirement Services division to craft two multi-million dollar procurements. I led both acquisitions, writing work statements, leading the proposal evaluation process and selecting vendors. I introduced a human-centered approach for both the creation of a calculation service and the replacement of the tool used to adjudicate the benefits for all retired federal employees. I managed the project teams and their managers and communicated with OPM stakeholders throughout the projects.

Outcome

We followed an approach for replacing LAS’s adjudication tools that was more centered on user needs than just about any federal development project I’ve ever been involved in.

Expanding Consular Affairs’ CX capabilities

A CASE STUDY

My roles

• Customer Experience Lead, GSA’s Centers of Excellence

• Business development

• Workstream lead

Consular Affairs (CA) is the public face of the Department of State. It is a massive organization and as a result, initiatives to improve customer experiences tend to be unevenly distributed across the bureau. When they wanted to invest in improving the experiences of their customers, they came to the Centers of Excellence (CoE) for strategy and leadership.

I designed CoE’s largest customer experience project. We conducted foundational human-centered design activities across five workstreams:

• CA/CX culture and policy

• Overseas Citizens Services (OCS)

• Passport Services

• Travel.state.gov

• Visa Services

I led the Passport Service workstream where our challenge was to create a foundation for human-centered design (HCD) while training and supporting their staff.

Solution: Conduct foundational customer research while bringing Passport Services staff and leadership along for the ride.

I managed a team of contractors. After conducting and analyzing a dozen stakeholder interviews to better understand the current state, I supervised user researchers in the creation of a foundational analysis of the needs of passport customers. The team researched two types of internal customers, call center staff and the people who adjudicate passport applications. That research informed a journey mapping workshop that I designed and facilitated with participants from across Passport Services.

A separate modernization effort emerged outside of our activities, which forced us to pivot to support the new work. I joined the modernization leadership team. We extended the initial customer research to develop service blueprints. I helped design and run a cross-departmental workshop, leveraging the service blueprints. We folded participant recommendations into modernization initiatives.

Impact

Passport Services leads all other Consular Affairs directorates in the breadth and depth of their HCD efforts. With our help, Passport Services staff and leadership developed and delivered their initial program of modernization initiatives.

Introducing Human-Centered Service Development

A CASE STUDY

My roles

• Customer Experience Lead, GSA’s Centers of Excellence

• Engagement lead

• Product development lead

• Workstream lead

The Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) collects taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms and ammunition. For more than two decades, TTB’s Office of the Chief Information Officer developed services with limited involvement from the rest of the bureau. The organization became less and less able to identify or address its customers’ needs as a result. An opportunity to rethink service development came with the retirement of the long-time CIO, but early efforts faltered.  

Hoping to bolster their nascent service development efforts, TTB asked CoE’s help to expand their customer experience capabilities and create an environment where innovation would be more easily adopted.  

Solution: Introduce service development that focused on satisfying customer needs

After interviewing a long list of TTB stakeholders, I came to believe that TTB’s resistance to innovation and lack of connection to customer needs were symptoms that could best be addressed with a new approach to developing services. I recommended a shift in the project’s scope to focus on their faltering service development efforts. 

• I supervised a team of contractors who conducted customer research, created customer archetypes and developed prototypes.

• I supervised a team of contractors who conducted customer research, created customer archetypes and developed prototypes.

• I assessed the maturity of TTB’s customer experience capabilities. I designed and facilitated an online workshop where staff and leaders from across the bureau created research-based journey maps

Impact

TTB started rolling out a new service development system as we were closing out our engagement. I collaborated with TTB stakeholders to create roadmaps for the delivery of services and the maturing of customer experience and product development capabilities. I also brought in another group from GSA to discuss how best to introduce product management expertise to support the new system.