Rethinking Your Customer Journey

Constituents rarely follow a neat path through government services — they jump between sites, forms, phone numbers and help desks. Because this customer journey isn’t linear, it’s critical to understand how to make each touch point impactful.

During the latest CX CoP session, we sat down with Jennifer Purdy, Executive Director, CX Tools and Implementation, Veterans Experience Office, VA, to discuss how to map their journey and test improvements within your organizational and budget constraints.  

Below are a few key takeaways from this dynamic session, as well as the on-demand recording.

1. What does the Veterans Experience Office do? Purdy explained that “our job is to make things more effective, efficient, and to make things emotionally relevant to our customers. And that includes each other as employees, but also to caregivers and family members, as well as survivors of veterans. Ultimately, it’s to build trust in the VA.” She added that, “we teach that the difference between customer service and customer experience is that emotional connection, it’s feeling valued as a customer, and it’s feeling valued as an employee. And that’s that emotional relevance, and you really can’t build trust and really get to experience unless you introduce that element of connection.”


2. The VA has faced challenges in building trust in the past. What has your office done to overcome those challenges? “We started with human-centered design, and asked veterans, what does ‘experience’ mean to you? What do you need from us? What’s it like to have care here?” Purdy said. Purdy and her colleagues specifically honed in on what the outpatient experience is, because that was the largest group of individuals in the VA’s care. “So we focused there and investigated what’s it like to come to a primary care provider, what’s it like to get medication, what’s it like to get X-rays and laboratory work done. We found, through this human-centered design study, the moments that mattered most to our patients. It was getting an appointment when they needed it, knowing how to get there, when they arrived, understanding how to navigate through our system and our wayfinding.”


3. What best CX practices can help other agencies improve? Purdy said that “you gotta get leaders engaged, they gotta get out of their office, they gotta walk the front line, they need to be able to talk to staff, they need to be able to talk to patients, find out what’s right, find out what’s wrong, and then do something about it. That is, hands down, the thing that creates the most synergy to get the most trust built and the most action happening.”

Want more helpful CX tips? Join us online Monday, March 16, from 4-4:30 p.m. ET/1-1:30 p.m. PT for How Your Digital Experience Can Support Crisis Response.