Top customer experience (CX) officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) detailed how their agencies are making major strides in the CX space – including the IRS testing new pilots for the upcoming tax season and the VA increasing trust to 80 percent.
It has been nearly three years since President Biden issued his December 2021 executive order that tasked Federal agencies with improving their CX across the government.
“The VA has had a little bit of a head start on this [executive order],” said the VA’s Deputy Chief Veteran Experience Officer Barbara Morton during an FNN webinar on Nov. 6. “Almost 10 years in now – January 2015 is when the Veterans Experience Office was stood up.”
Morton said the VA measured veterans’ trust in the agency at 55 percent when they stood up the office in 2015. In 2024, they reached a record high of 80 percent – showing that veterans trust the VA more than ever before.
“All of that is really a testament to this cultural movement, this transformation that’s happened over many, many years,” Morton said. “[Trust is] our North Star … Veterans are reflecting back to us how they’re feeling about us, and that’s one of our key measures of performance, and we’re thrilled to have that accomplishment this year.”
Morton drilled down on the importance of human-centered design when it comes to CX. She highlighted the Veterans Health Administration’s Patient Experience Program which delivered insights from veterans that empowered employees to deliver great experiences, and boosted VA healthcare’s outpatient trust to 90 percent.
Morton said when the VA began its CX transformation a decade ago, the focus was on healthcare as that’s where they served the most veterans. Now, the agency is beginning to shift its CX focus to VA benefits and helping veterans who are transitioning out of service and into civilian life.
“We’ve been working across agencies to make sure that we can provide a single digital tool where veterans, family members, and service members can do a customized self-search capability online to see what type of services and resources [and] benefits might be available – not just through VA – but across other agencies as well,” Morton said. “So, that’s going to be another focus area for us.”
IRA Funding ‘Unleashed’ CX at IRS
The IRS is another agency that began its CX work in 2019 ahead of the executive order, according to the agency’s Deputy Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer Courtney Kay-Decker.
The IRS was given a boost in CX funding with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, and what that “has unleashed in our agency to improve service to our taxpayers has been just phenomenal,” Kay-Decker said.
This past tax season, Kay-Decker said the IRS was able to help 11 million more taxpayers over the phone by reducing wait times by 3.3 million hours. “There were times when our wait times were three minutes or less for somebody to get an assister on the phone,” she said.
This is in part due to a new pilot program the IRS is offering its employees, dubbed Taxpayer 360, that allows the customer service representatives to see everything they need to know about the taxpayer that is calling them in real time.
“Now, they have to look at 10 different systems, and some of them are the old DOS format where you have to memorize all of these codes to understand what you’re reading,” Kay-Decker explained. Taxpayer 360 will make the interaction more seamless for the IRS employee and in return keep the taxpayer on the phone for a shorter period.
Another ongoing CX initiative the IRS has been working on is improvements to its tax notices, Kay-Decker said, which before the IRA funding was “incredibly difficult” due to the agency’s legacy technology.
“The Inflation Reduction Act has allowed us to take the time that we needed,” she said. “Implementing software is usually not an overnight thing … it often takes many years, so that multiyear funding has been fabulous to help us in this notice initiative.”
“How do we make those notices better and communicate what a taxpayer needs to know to solve their problem has been a huge focus for us,” Kay-Decker said. “We’re hoping to have about 200 notices revised by the end of this year, and the vast majority of those notices are slated at that same time to be available in your online account.”
For this upcoming tax season, Kay-Decker said the IRS is focused on agile deployment of new digital tools for customers – on par with industry best practices – rather than holding new features for bigger releases.
The IRS is making constant tweaks to its online accounts, including adding small business and sole proprietor accounts.
“Simple, seamless, and secure – those words in the executive order are words we live by. Simple and seamless at the end of the day doesn’t mean anything if the interaction can’t be secure, particularly when you’re dealing with the kind of data that we have at the IRS,” she said.
