The head of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) new customer experience (CX) office offered insights on Tuesday into the agency’s upcoming CX goals as DHS looks to improve experience across an estimated one billion “touch points” with the public every year.
During a Federal News Network webinar on Nov. 7, Dana Chisnell highlighted some of the projects the less than two-month-old office has begun spearheading, including standing up CX offices in each of DHS’s component agencies.
“The Department of Homeland Security is a huge agency,” Chisnell said. “We have eight operating component agencies that cover a lot of ground, a lot of different kinds of customers – from travelers and businesses and trade and export and import to law enforcement to people applying for immigration benefits. We have about a billion touch points with the public every year. This is a huge undertaking to improve every one of those touch points.”
“We did stand up and formalize a CX office … and while that is it is a beautiful institutionalizing step, we have been working on customer experience efforts since [2021],” Chisnell said.
“But now that we’re formalized, this gives us billets and budget and authority that we didn’t necessarily have before, including authority to direct the components to stand up their own offices or capabilities over the next year,” she said. “We’re so excited about that, and that work is underway now.”
DHS announced the formal creation of its CX office under Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen in September, naming Chisnell as the executive director of CX at the department.
Between the Transportation Security Administration and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services – among several other component agencies – DHS interacts more frequently on a daily basis with the American public than any other Federal agency. Chisnell touted that the biggest CX accomplishment of the department has been reducing the amount of time the public spends accessing DHS services by more than 20 million hours.
“We’ve managed to do quite a lot even though we only just formalized the office leading up to this point,” Chisnell said. “One of the biggest accomplishments, I think, is that we ran a burden reduction initiative at CIO Hysen’s urging. OMB estimates that the department puts about 190 million burden hours on the public through forms or through data collections.”
“Last year, we eliminated 20 million of those burden hours working with [Paperwork Reduction Act] Officers and programs across the department. This is a huge undertaking, it took, I don’t know, probably hundreds of people working on various user experience efforts as well as policy and process improvement,” she said. “We’re really proud … While the challenge was eliminating 20 million hours, we actually exceeded that and reached about 21.5 million hours.”
Chisnell said it’s a current priority to eliminate the burden even further – by 10 million additional hours.
The CX lead also highlighted DHS’s new CX website, DHS.gov/CX.
“We’ve managed to pull together really beautiful resources on a public website … that we use ourselves, but also is for building capacity and capabilities across the department for anybody who wants to do CX work, or who is just CX curious,” she said.
The new website is a part of a larger goal to build CX capacity and training as well as shift the culture to be more human-centric at DHS, Chisnell said.
She said, “We can’t hire fast enough and lots of people are doing this work and they’re doing well, but we can elevate them and improve their skills and train even more people to do it just as part of their job to understand who their customers are and what their needs are and how to beat those.”
