As one of the largest agencies focused on people, the Department of Veterans Affairs is trying to maximize how they serve customers. The department is always trying to adopt the best practices for customers, and they’re changing up their web presence to better reflect that. Barbara Morton, Deputy Chief Customer Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, says that the Department is aligned with the customer experience priorities expressed by the greater federal government.
“We are really trying to approach that in a number of different ways. Certainly, the core capabilities and design practice of human centered design. Then you of course have the implementation piece. You also have in government two other factors that are important to bake sit into the organization. One is governance. In an organization as large as VA and frankly any organization, you need to hardwire and bake in those customer experience insights at the highest levels of decision-making. We’re doing that, but we also have accountability piece as well,” Morton said. “At an organizational level we are holding ourselves accountable to the President’s Management Agenda which has as a priority item, customer experience… Then on an individual level. We are holding senior executives accountable for customer experience. We’re really trying to pack in customer experience every way we possibly can to make sure it is a long-lasting capability and not personality-driven.”