On the front lines of customer service in government

In the mid-2010s, it wasn’t hard to see why veterans found so many of their interactions with the VA exasperating. If they needed to access healthcare services, they had to go to one website. There was a different one for disability benefits. Yet another website helped them apply for education benefits. The VA’s digital platforms were spread across multiple sites, with a total of hundreds of portals and pages across the agency, many of them disconnected. Employees who worked in one business line had limited tools for sharing data with those in other areas, requiring veterans to submit the same information to different areas of the VA to accomplish seemingly simple tasks like updating their mailing address when they moved.

“You don’t want your customer to have to learn your org chart, especially in a 400,000-person organization,” says Charles Worthington, who joined the VA as its CTO in 2017. “The magic trick with technology is to try and make that invisible to the customer.”
 

Many of the processes VA staffers use in their work had to be digitized and automated—from medical notes and records scribbled on paper to the claims appeal process, which included hearings captured on cassette tapes.

On the front end, the VA launched its first unified and cohesive portal, VA.gov, in 2016, giving veterans one place to go to access digital government services and information. A redesign in 2018 helped make the site even more customer-centric, resulting in a significant bump to its customer satisfaction score and a more than doubling of monthly total users. Similar positive user responses have also been logged for the VA’s mobile app, the one Boerstler used to file his burn pit claim. Launched last year, it has 2 million active users.

Reaching these milestones required extraordinary efforts. Customer experience staffers fanned out across the country and online, talking to roughly 500 veterans and asking what they wanted to be able to do on VA.gov. Hiring for roles like customer experience designers and data scientists took years because these job classifications didn’t exist at the VA. In the interim, tech leaders found talent by partnering with innovation labs and programs across the government. IT teams also had to learn to adopt a new mindset. Instead of working on finite projects with a beginning, middle, and end, they were now responsible for products that would be continuously improved and updated.

Even after nearly a decade of careful listening and the implementation of hundreds, if not thousands, of changes, the VA still has a list of customer experience to-dos. “Customer acquisition,” for instance, is still a pain point. One woman in Virginia, for example, cared for her disabled husband for years without realizing he had VA benefits. After learning of them through a virtual one-on-one meeting with a VA rep, the caregiver called the interaction “life-changing,” since she was able to significantly cut back on the two jobs she’d been working to pay for their family’s health insurance. But such efforts to reach veterans, their families, and members of the military who are transitioning to civilian life haven’t gone far enough, Boerstler says. Currently, only half of new veterans access VA services. “We’ve been waiting for veterans to come to us rather than going to meet them where they are,” he says.

Perhaps no one is waxing poetic about interacting with the IRS, Health and Human Services, or a passport office today. But thinking back to his 2009 experience filing a VA claim, Boerstler concludes that if one of the federal government’s largest and fastest-growing agencies can turn itself around, anything is possible.