Every Project Needs a Plan

There are many resources for building CX into your agency. But all of them emphasize the same essential building blocks.

First and foremost, you need to know where you are. The CX Maturity Model, developed by the General Services Administration (GSA), is designed to help you do just that.

Determine Your Agency’s CX Maturity

The product of GSA’s CX Center of Excellence (CoE), the model defines key concepts and identifies five levels of CX maturity:

Customer-centric. Agencies that are structured primarily around customer needs and have the tools to measure that performance.

Foundational. Agencies that have a clear CX strategy and coordinated CX programs to carry it out.

Strategic. Agencies that have introduced enough customer-oriented programs to begin incorporating research and analysis.

Tactical. Agencies that have done some customer research, mostly as part of other projects.

Reactive. Agencies that have little understanding of their customers.

Learn About Your Customers — and Keep Learning

To commit to CX, you have to know who your customers are. When you’re laying the groundwork, use the tools you already have. Staff, especially frontliners, can help you begin to define your customers and assess how you’re serving them.

Give everyone access to customers and their concerns. Have employees listen in on customer service calls and watch user research from existing projects.

Your call center may provide the only hard data you have at the outset. Begin to pull customer-related data from other projects. Build toward collecting enough qualitative and quantitative data to support a systemic customer orientation.

Borrow, Build and Hire to Increase Internal Skills

Use contractors to bring in capacities you don’t yet have. Start by adding CX to contract requirements, especially for projects that will be public-facing. Build on that by having staff work beside contractors to learn the ropes. Include a requirement for training agency staff in the contract language.

Train employees on new tools as you bring them in. When it’s time to add internal experts, start with user experience (UX) professionals to promote HCD within your organization.

One caveat from the CoE: Hold off on hiring a Customer Experience Officer (CXO) or setting up a CX office before your organization is ready. It shouldn’t be your first step. 

Make Design Intentional

Improving customer satisfaction requires overcoming technical debt. You may need to start with piecemeal improvements, but eventually agencies need longer-term solutions intended from the outset to improve customer interactions.

In the past, solutions were often ad-hoc, with users as an afterthought. Both service design and HCD organize efforts around users, incorporating input from both internal and external customers. The goal is a design pipeline that begins and ends with users.

CX Everywhere

Good CX isn’t having a well-staffed CX office: It’s having CX inform every decision throughout the organization. CX needs to be a priority — and a core capability — in every department.

This article appears in “Improving Customer Experience: A Nuts-and-Bolts Guide.” For more insights into making your organization more customer-friendly, download the guide.