The Pentagon’s administrative and management support agency has developed and will soon implement a customer experience (CX) management plan, an agency official said on Tuesday.
Tashona Beale, chief experience strategist for the Defense Department’s (DoD) Washington Headquarters Services (WHS), explained that the WHS CX Management Plan for fiscal years 2024 to 2027 “will identify, communicate, and organize how the WHS will implement a CX strategy across the department.”
“We are currently implementing four objectives within that management plan,” Beale said during Federal News Network’s CX Exchange Forum on April 23.
The first and second objectives — “establishing and implementing customer service standards” and “establishing a baseline of customer service satisfaction scores” — create a customer service baseline. The objectives were created in response to CX surveys WHS conducted to understand areas of improvement and success areas in WHS’s customer service experience.
“To improve you have to know who you are. We conducted customer service baseline surveys and with the results, we understood where we scored in certain areas consistent with our customer service standards and our key performance indicators,” Beale said.
Beale further explained her team is in “[contact] with each director within our organization so they can understand where they stood in terms of customer feedback scores,” and the next step will be to take those scores and establish a 12-month goal.
Another objective is to roll out customer service and customer experience training. Currently, WHS’s CX Office is rolling out four training courses. According to Beale, WHS plans to introduce more training courses after 2025.
The WHS 101 training, which is currently available to all WHS employees, covers foundational knowledge about WHS, its directorates, and its offices. The second training, WHS customer service standards, will include real-world scenarios of how to apply customer service standards.
WHS also plans to roll out a CX training for managers and supervisors, which covers how WHS leaders can leverage CX principles to impact the mission’s success. The CX for employees training — which WHS plans to establish in 2025 — trains WHS employees to leverage CX principles to impact professional growth and the daily interaction between staffers and customers.
The last objective is to establish a customer experience recognition program for employees, which will be established through data from its training modules and WHS customer surveys.
“The best way to measure success is to make sure leaders, employees, customers, and stakeholders know what you’re doing. A feedback loop is very important,” Beale said.
Beale did not offer further details on when WHS will release an official public version of the plan.
