The ways in which the federal government interacts with its citizens has become a major focal point for agencies in recent years. Customer experience, or CX, is increasingly appearing on agency leaders’ priority lists, especially following President Biden’s 2021 executive order calling for agencies to design and deliver services with “a focus on the actual experience of the people whom it is meant to serve.”As evidence of CX’s growing importance in the public sector, in September 2023 the Department of Homeland Security stood up an office entirely focused on improving CX across the agency. Dana Chisnell, executive director for the Customer Experience Directorate at DHS, spoke about the importance of CX for DHS and within the broader federal government ecosystem during the Potomac Officers Club’s CX Imperative Forum this week.DHS’ Dana Chisnell speaks at the Potomac Officers Club’s CX Imperative Forum. Photo by Alex Mangione.“We are focused on the sum total of the interactions that folks have with a service or with an agency. We’re really looking across the journey that someone has when they interact with the government, when they come to us for services, when they come to us because they’re in need,” said Chisnell at the forum.“In the federal government, it’s not a one time transaction. It’s a lifetime of interactions, a lifetime of touch points… and we have more touch points than any other civilian agencies,” she added.Chisnell shared that in 2023, DHS components eliminated 21.4 million burden hours out of 190 million total for its customers. Currently, the agency is taking on a challenge to eliminate 10 million more burden hours. Much of the work the CX Directorate will be doing over the next year will be focused on CX within the acquisition process, Chisnell said. This includes creating a better experience for offerers and to the marketplace, as well as ensuring the criteria and rubrics for evaluating CX offers are in place. “I would love to see [CX] language and requirements in every single acquisition and every single procurement independent of what it is,” she said. “It could be an intel system, it could be something that supports heavy equipment, it could be anything. I would like to see injections of human-centered design, customer experience embedded in all of those things.” Chisnell also mentioned that artificial intelligence, automation and data sharing will be important to achieving the agency’s CX goals. “Integrating data sources across the department is going to be really useful for a lot of improvements for a lot of customers,” Chisnell shared. “We are trying to work in a much more cross-functional way.”According to Chisnell, DHS is doing a growing amount of cross-functional and cross-component work — and not just as a special one-off project, but as ongoing, coordinated efforts — to ensure that CX initiatives are relying upon accurate data.
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