Match Employee Skills to Customer Needs for Happy Customer Experience

To serve its customers best, the Defense Digital Service (DDS) recruits employees with the skills and capabilities its customers need.

“One of DDS’ values is, ‘No one else is coming. It’s up to us.’ Everyone on our team takes that to heart,” said Christan (CJ) Johnson, Talent Lead at DDS Talent Acquisition.

DDS is a team of Defense Department (DoD) technologists that works on high-impact projects for DoD’s most important initiatives and operations. Its mission is to “implement thoughtful technology to better government services, strengthen national defense, and care for service members and their families.”

The challenges and problems they take on require a scrappy, agile, get-it-done attitude, Johnson said. Candidates go through a rigorous interview process for both technical skills and cultural fit, so that its customers – military service members, other federal agencies, etc. – can reap the benefits of the team’s products and successes.

For a good customer experience (CX), which is the sum of all interactions an entity has with an organization, matching the customer with the right resources is critical.

“Matching the best person to empathize and work with the customer drives a lot of efficiency. It makes the process better. It makes engagement better. It makes customer experience better,” said Mike O’Brien, Senior Sales Executive at Avaya, a communications technology company.

A technology called enterprise behavioral pairing is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can help match employees and customers at outward-facing entities such as call centers.

To leverage this kind of AI, however, the organization first needs to understand the diverse demographics of its customers. For instance, younger people may want to connect through text rather than the phone. Those with limited vision may only be able to connect through the phone, and not email or text. “From a diversity and inclusion perspective, it’s important for organizations to match the right resource with the customer inquiry or intent,” O’Brien said at GovLoop’s online training Wednesday.

To serve a diverse range of customers inclusively, agencies’ teams that serve them need to be diverse as well. In other words, being diverse and inclusive maps back to meeting customer needs and ultimately providing good CX.

“It’s about getting after where we want to go. It’s not just to say, ‘We have x, y and z on our team,’” Johnson said.

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