Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Chief Information Officer (CIO) Guy Cavallo previewed his agency’s upcoming new website on Thursday, which he said is centered around improving four specific customer experiences and helping customers quickly find what they’re looking for.
OPM is currently working to revamp OPM.gov thanks to a recent $6 million Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) investment to update the technology behind, and content on, the website.
“We are going through a massive digital transformation focused on improving the customer experience,” Cavallo said during an Aug. 3 ATARC webinar. “The customer experience today is pretty horrible – that’s the best technical term to describe where we are – but the good news is we know that, we’re investing in it.”
The CIO said the TMF funding will modernize OPM’s website and make it easier to use. He also noted that OPM.gov will go from an on-premise, data center-hosted website to a cloud-hosted website.
“I think our customers’ expectations are shattered when they actually come to our website, and hope to have found something easy to find,” Cavallo said. “We have a very traditional government website today. And that means that it’s organized by our org chart, which only the people within OPM know what that means.”
“So, we did some pretty extensive studies and we came up with four user personas that really capture the bulk of people that want information from OPM,” he added.
The first user group is current Federal employees, Cavallo said. OPM’s number one website hit is the page with Federal pay tables, he explained, which goes to show that Federal employees are an important customer base.
The second user group, according to Cavallo, is current Federal retirees. Every Federal employee at some point relies on OPM for their retirement, which he said offers an entirely different use case for the OPM website.
Cavallo said the third group is job seekers, who are using OPM’s website to look at their employment options within the Federal government.
The fourth group is agency human resources (HR) professionals, Cavallo said. These users come to the OPM website to make sure they’re up to date on current Federal policies – such as telework or hybrid policies.
“Definitely, there are other requirements with that, but when we look at those four customer experiences, that covers the vast majority of people that want to come and get information from OPM,” Cavallo said.
