The Department of Defense (DoD) and its components are planning to add chief experience and customer experience officers to their leadership ranks – in line with trends at other Federal agencies that have been making pushes to boost their customer experience (CX) capabilities – a top customer experience official for the Pentagon said on Friday.
During a keynote at the ACT-IAC CX Summit on Nov. 15, Savan Kong – who is the customer experience officer in DoD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer – said the department will create the new positions across the agency to help develop and implement CX programs and initiatives.
“The reason why that’s important is because a lot of times when you talk to your designers or … customer experience managers, that information never actually makes its way back up to the planning process for those organizations,” said Kong. “You should probably have design leadership, and you should budget for that. You should plan to support them.”
The implementation of customer experience officers will extend to military service branches including the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, Kong said. Those officials will be responsible for guiding conversations and identifying priorities that their respective organizations need to have to effectively “drive change,” he said.
“We don’t know the problems that are systemic to the mission sets with our partners, so we rely on these leaders to be able to take that information and bring it back up, controlling the narrative,” said Kong.
In addition to establishing CX leadership roles, DoD is deploying a new toolkit coined the UX Toolkit, which will be a scalable “living artifact” that organizations can access and build upon successes in improving CX documentation, performance tracking, and other processes. The tool will be accessible in a hybrid format and available to other DoD organizations, Kong said.
The DoD is also adopting a data-driven approach to enhance CX by evaluating metrics collected at the department level. Access to large data pools and the ability to use data effectively to “tell your story” can drive improvement, especially when considering the user’s perspective, Kong explained.
“If you don’t understand the bigger picture, you’re not going to be able to tie in whatever initiatives you’re using back to that bigger picture,” said Kong. “You have to be able to write in an authoritative way so that people can actually read what you’re trying to communicate to them and then have some sort of action associated with that.”
Speaking from experience in executing new initiatives, establishing new leadership roles, and moving forward in modernizing CX offices, Kong added that as other agencies and organizations look at CX, remembering to do the right thing – and doing it well – is key to success.
“That right thing may be the hardest thing to do, or that right thing may be the thing that is going to cause you a little bit more work … but you know what that is right,” said Kong. “I would say, as you continue to do the right thing, it doesn’t matter if the project’s failed … you’ll feel good about the work you’ve done.”
