The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is well along in a “reimagining” how the department is handling and improving its customer care experience, said Simchah Suveyke-Bogin, chief experience officer at the agency, today.
During the “Carahsoft Government Customer Experience And Engagement Summit,” hosted by GovExec on June 1, she discussed how the agency is moving into the future of customer experience both for government officials and USDA customers.
“[The] things that we’re doing right now is really looking at our talent, looking at … building in more expertise like product management, content designers, and researchers,” she said.
Suveyke-Bogin added that part of this reimagining effort at USDA has involved looking at not only the talent that employees offer, but also at the untapped potential of feedback that employees can offer the department.
“I think there’s just so much more we can do with our employees … I think there’s a lot of untapped listening that we can do with our employees. So we’re really working very diligently to figure out what are our employees need the most right now,” said Suveyke-Bogin.
Moving forward, she said the department will need to focus on using AI diligently to get qualitative data sets that are not typical for the department in order to drive a better customer experience in the future.
“It really helps us on the business side, to kind of figure out how we want to prioritize, then unfold what tech could really support those opportunities,” said Suveyke-Bogin. “So I think that we can continuously build up the importance of qualitative and experience data, I think [that’s] going to be very critical to understanding what direction we need to go in.”
The steps being taken by the Agriculture Department and at other government agencies come after the White House Executive Order from late 2021 looking to transform the Federal government’s customer experience.
“I think we’ve seen a lot of emphasis around … agencies rallying around their customers … [also] rallying around some of those high impact services and delivery mechanisms that we currently have in place since the [EO],” she said.
