The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has released a “Customer Experience (CX) Cookbook” for Federal agencies that features key ingredients and recipes for embedding CX in Federal services and for cooking up CX best practices.
VA has been prepping in the kitchen for adopting best CX practices since 2015, and has taken its lead for the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goal from the Veterans Experience Office.
“As part of our leadership role with [the Office of Management and Budget] on the PMA CX CAP Goal over the last few years, we have been fortunate to be able to work with our CX brothers and sisters across Federal agencies, who are seeking to build or mature their CX capabilities,” Deputy Chief Veterans Experience officer Barbara Morton said in a blog post. “Often times, our counterparts have asked us to detail how we got started at VA and how we have been able to establish VA’s first-ever customer experience program through the Veterans Experience Office, producing tangible results for Veterans and their supporters.”
According to the cookbook, folding in CX capabilities by an agency requires baking in various ingredients within eight categories, including: strategy, operations, funding, organization, culture, incentives, partnerships, and capabilities.
“We also have recognized that there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to implementing a CX program, as each agency’s culture and its environmental readiness are unique,” Morton said. “Thus, the concept of a CX Cookbook – highlighting key, common ingredients along with agency-specific ‘recipes’ that account for adaptations and sequencing to execute – emerged.”
