so we're going to start off with a question for the entire group um so according to 2022 research by service now and thought lab uh 35% of public and private sector organizations uh globally have provided a higher quality of service by tightening aligning customer experience and employee experience and this number is expected to grow to 43% by this year so total experience is really that approach that organizations are taking to combine the experiences of all users that they interact with employees their customers their internal customers um so how are your organizations using this approach to create stronger relationships with your customers and your employees Chris okay I'll take a stab at this one just because we've had to take this approach because when we talk about soldiers they don't neatly align into one or the other so is a soldier a customer is a soldier an employee is a soldier something else entirely now when I was working at Human Resources command obviously they're a consumer of our services they're a customer but they're also employees of the army but large so what we had to do was separate out an totally different category on how we were looking at end to-end total experience yeah and similarly at CBP we have a a similar experience that our customer is actually our employees so the experience uh to the customer is our you know our border patrol agents our offo officers so we had to look at it a little bit differently uh to maybe to something similar to a a chain or or some type of other industry our customer as the Frontline officers their in engagement with the field customers is dependent on how well we provide customer services in cloud and operations to them and I bet that that's really varies with those folks being out in the field not at the desk right the type of experience that they're needing and and wanting really varies from your traditional desk employee AB absolutely we realized that lowend Solutions such as connectivity is very important to a border patrol agent uh that's a part of the customer experience uh interesting enough when we we reach out to the field officers they're not really interested in you know the the high-end application development it's all about connectivity I can't use my Tac devices I'm I'm blind out here so that customer experience has resonated back into our field offices yeah I bet I I think similar to my panelist here some experience for us in da our customers our users our internal employees are tightly tethered together uh we're not successful if we don't really tap into the defense industrial base so for us it's delivering those capabilities in a synergistic fashion so that the employee who's helping the service the war fighter our vendors our suppliers they're getting a similar experience at the same time cuz in some cases our vendors and our suppliers support closely the warf fighter so it's really a synergistic approach to delivering capabilities yeah similar to my co to my colleagues um you know being in the Office of Management for the NSF office Inspector General we're a small office 87 folks on board a very strong remote hybrid posture so a lot of our customers which are colleagues our employees um don't come into headquarters very often they're out in the field you know in their offices go to us attorney's offices going to grante offices when they're doing audits Etc and we need to make sure that we're providing the tools they need to do their jobs effectively but also efficiently right to make sure that we're changing with the times and providing them the tools they need so the question really now becomes from our office you tell us what and we'll tell you how sure yeah I think we've all experienced the shift over the course of our careers from having you know experiences at at home or in our personal life and then not having that same experience at work and trying to get to a point where we're having those more tightly aligned I think is is really valuable and I think we're all starting to get there right um Javier this question is actually U directed at you so customers want reliable service across all the different channels that they interact with so that might be text chat phone email how do you sort of Define that approach or interact with that approach to make sure that it's seem L across all those different um experiences yeah this is you know certainly a journey not a destination right right we started you know I've been in this office almost two years now um early on it was really basically emails to individuals um then we became you know this email Alias organization so that multiple people had access to a question or things that they needed and we didn't have a single point of failure now we're going into the interestingly in love a service now platform for HR using RSD and our Legal Services uh in LSD as well to provide that seamless experience for our folks because they we really don't expect them to know what to ask necessarily and creating these be being able to build out these modules within service now and other platforms to show them how easy it could be and change the dynamic right and and try to you know somebody early on had talked about you know the this uh community of the unwilling or some to that effect and it's you know PE moving people's cheese right if anybody read the moveie you know don't move my cheese it really is a thing right people are accustomed to certain things they're comfortable with it I still get questions like why can't I just reach out to Javier because I know that Javier is working on it well but maybe Javier's on leave and he's allowed to do that right and do you want to wait a week you know is that really the the employee or customer experience you want so it's really that changing that mindset from a personal human perspective but also from a automation perspective making sure that we're providing the right tools that people need even if they don't know it yet yeah you know I was talking to a customer earlier today who was saying we really have to show our customers the the value so that they can kind of get on board with us and I think by being able to provide that experience where I can pick up you know the interaction from one channel to another um hopefully gets that employee to a place where they feel like they've been shown the value of allowing their cheese to be moved to use your your term um Mark so CX and ex are interconnected but does one ever take precedence over the other and what is the balance that organizations need to take to to work to meet their missions while balancing those two thank you for the question that's going to get me in the most trouble hope this is recorded session I probably have 70,000 of my closest employee friends right are waiting on on this answer but historically customer service has always been the main focus but uh moving forward employee Focus they're inter intertwined with each other that's why you have the total experience uh you know highle set up for I customer experience understanding both sides as a CX leader understanding what the challenges of employee experience and vice versa is probably the most important so that long-winded answer is both they're both very important and we're seeing that customer experience was the primary focus for an organization but over time the last five or 10 years employing employee experience has probably become as important or more important especially in my organization Dan if I can jump on that one also just to kind of echo what Mark said about how they're completely intertwined you know as we look at providing the best customer service possible in our case providing HR services for our soldiers by looking at the employee experience giving them the tools the time the resources the support to provide what is needed in terms of help for the soldier you can't separate the two because I can't just tell the employee that they have to do this job without supporting them and understanding their experience and their needs and their resources yeah I think we all have experienced just as as customers ourselves what it's like to be served or helped by someone who likes their job and has the resources they need um do you want to add something there yeah one one of the things we found and it's a challenge within it organizations the customer experience for the IT professional may look different than to the Layman to the business to the operator and so it's really helping us to understand taking the it lens off just a little bit and understanding what a customer who may be immersed in Legacy technology for multiple decades how they may view the technology as being a little more intimidating and so experiencing it through their eyes and bringing them along progressively uh to Javier's point you know tell us the what we'll tell you the how but that is a relationship building process in my experience yeah getting that trust we've also seen acceleration probably during covid for employee experience uh as everyone knows uh prior to covid meetings were held in face to face in conference rooms and the employee experience I I believe teams or webx was became the most important application in during the co uh years so there's a high level focus on employee engagement Health of employees how they are doing out out the fields with remote connections now so employee experience has probably risen to the equ equality of uh customer experience yeah I think there's you know a word that we use a lot is intentionality Right making sure that we're communicating in a way that's more intentional than it was pre-co right pre-co it was you know pretty much routine we knew where everybody was they're sitting down the hallway in the office next door for the most part now we've gotten to this you know postco somewhat hybrid somewhat remote posture depending on the organization you're working and we've been trying to be more intentional of how we communicate I'm proud to say that in the 23 uh federal employee Viewpoint survey our office came out with a score of 88 for employee experience that's amazing and we had an 85% response rate right so it's not like 10% of the people said you know that 88% is good it's you know 85% saying that we're doing a really good job on the employee experience piece nobody's perfect I think it's a very nent process we're talking about it backstage about you know how does this evolve into something else tomorrow six months from now a year from now but I think people are starting to understand to the point made before is if you're happy if you're satisfied if you're engaged if your experience as an employee is good by default your posture is going to be different it's going to be more positive and hopefully that translates into a better customer experience and then provide that total experience that we're talking about yeah absolutely well congratulations on that score that's um that is certainly an accomplishment um so the next question is really about how organizations are rethinking the services that they offer and they deliver to the public um so how you reach people how can you be more efficient how can you build trust um so how do you all break down silos and build cross functional processes to improve availability transparency and speed soab so what we're learning through some trials if if I'm being honest is that uh the public for us often times is the war fighter right uh the military services the combatant commands those are the folks that we want to deliver products to and that uh experience involves customers vendors suppliers uh our it shop our employees 25,000 member employee Force so it's bringing folks along on the journey sometimes that takes the form of and we've done this our platform lead for service now has conducted workshops to say you know what we're going to bring you in early in the experience we're going to help you shape and frame what the experience look like now there's some we've got some boundaries but we get them invested in early I think that's a big big plus for us additionally uh to continue from an agile perspective let's get you something that's minimally viable now I know we all know being it folks that sometimes our customers focus on the minimal and not the viable right I was just talking about this with the customer building that trust and hey I'm going to deliver you something viable today but I'm going to commit to the promises to continue to deliver an ad out fashion and I expect you're going to learn more from being inside the tool and experiencing the tool so that's some of what trying to do absolutely yeah I want to build a little bit off of that also and just say we were talking a little bit earlier about consistency of experience and about consistency of quality um looking at this from the I don't I don't think I have to tell everybody just how challenging the recruiting piece of this is looking at the holistically the Army brand we can't do any of these things separately we can't look at just a branding and a marketing piece a recruiting piece a soldier experience once you're in the Army piece and transition veteran experience we have to look at the entirety of the process and break down the silos so that we have consistency of expectation where we get into trouble is when we have those inconsistencies and it breeds just trust because if we promise something we don't deliver on it I mean I can't go out and sell a broken car I've got to be able to on the human resources side and the veteran experience side make those align with everything that we're promising on the front end which is something that we're trying very hard to map out and do yeah I think a lot of what both of you are saying really comes back to that trust right getting the trust of your customer whoever that may be employees internal external and and we've lost quite a bit of trust uh by not aligning to understanding the cross functionality within an organization our border patrol agents whether a southern border patrol agent has a different experience in a Northern border patrol agent and that data sharing is key and Monumental in understanding how the things that you implement me affect all of your agency not just the one or two situations that are deemed viable within uh headquarters we've always always been challenged with that communication out to the employee experience and what one of the thing I would implore to to anyone going down this journey is don't just follow the the Legacy data uh data capture whether it be a survey everyone hates a 100 page survey or or some type of chat look at some of your inherent tools for employee or customer experience you know logs event logs Mission reports things where you you could hear either the frustration or the acceptance of way processes and things are flowing within your work yeah I think being able to do some of that modernization and transformation instead of just rebuilding what you already had is something that often gets lost in some of these big projects I think we also have to have you know in customer experience especially we have to have thick skin right and we can't take things personally unless they're really personal then that's a different story right you know in an office of Inspector General our external customers a lot of them are upset they're filing a complaint potentially reporting whistleblower retaliation they're submitting a complaint again you know alleging research misconduct things like that so we really need to be levelheaded not take things personally because it may impact the work that we do or how we see those complaints right and again if your employee experience is positive if more satisfied as an employee odds are that you're going to be much more level-headed you're not going to take things personally you're going to look at things unbiased our assistant IG for investigation says all the time we follow the facts right there is no you know personal investment really in any of these investigations or potential investigation same thing with audits you know that oversight piece is really unbiased and we just look at the facts and go from there yeah this next question is for you James uh so the D defense Logistics agency provides worldwide logistic support for all the military personnel Readiness what investments have you made to make sure made in TX to ensure that mission success now great question a little bit of context for da and maybe this is known but uh I think I mentioned early we've got a 25,000 member Workforce um we deliver between 47 and 48 billion dolls in goods and services every year and beyond that we're heavily dependent upon the de the defense industrial base to deliver and so maybe we have about 10,000 automated contracts daily so I just want to give a little bit of scope to kind of to answer that question a little bit um what we've begun to do across a vast space we also manage you know nine classes of supply and so what we're learning when we deal with each of those individual major subordinate commands within the LA what we're learning and unpacking a little bit more is that there are probably more similarities and differences but when you are highly focused as you should be on delivering you know MREs or Repairables or fuels to that customer it's super important that you have a platform that's robust enough to kind of manage uh I think I mentioned earlier but if I didn't we're undertaking a digital business transformation they're 19 initiatives not the least of which is moving our Erp which is sap from a legacy platform multiple decades old to the latest s4a platform in doing so we made a pretty I think important investment in service now 2019 one of the attractive features of that platform was that we could utilize service now in concert with our ARP to deliver what service now does well low code uh maybe interfacing and still get the transactional horsepower of the Erp so some of those Investments have been critical for us now I'm glad we did it now at the time we a little bit hesitant we also uh invested in capabilities across CRM demand management portfolio management and so on and so forth so we're really moving away from that Old analog thinking to a digital core platform with mature apis so I think the Investments we made in our platforms while we're modernizing some Legacy system set us up nicely for delivering across a space where we expect vendors to be on our platforms we expect the war fight in some cases and certainly our 25,000 member Workforce so those are some of the Investments I could go on but I just a few things we've done yeah and I'm sure that's having a huge impact on the workforce and and probably allowing you to retain your Workforce and and make sure that they don't get too frustrated with some of those Legacy applications right uh so this next question is for you Chris uh what are the biggest challenges that the US Army Recruiting Command faces in implementing new technologies to support people analytics and talent management I know you probably it's a big question I was going to say is there an all of the above answer here right I have to add the disclaimer that you know my snark is not the opinion of the Army and the dod when it comes to some of these things but in truth I mean that's kind of what draws us to things like this it is a challenge but I want to kind of come back to The Silo discussion that we had earlier anytime you have decisions being made as independent entities and not part of a holistic process you're going to run into challenges so that's one of the biggest things we have as we're looking at people analytics and talent management if we look at each segment of a soldier experience by itself and not in context then we're going to have problems with authorities we're going to have problems with the underlying data architecture all the different pieces of what we need to implement these programs now one of the things I'm excited about and we're starting to do is that we're partnering across the HR Enterprise with peeis with Acquisitions with technology with our partners in Academia and Industry and really looking at how we structure our total Soldier experience how we are looking at the overarch in authorities building coalitions and building collaboration across the space and how we're building the underlying architecture and selection of technologies that use this data longitudinally so the more we can overcome those the more we can look at this as not just a whole bunch of different Investments that we're going to go and immediately get quick wins for but things that are going to turn some immediate Roi for us but also long-term Investments that are going to improve the overall quality of the total experience we're going to do well yeah absolutely and I'm sure that helps you really direct where your work is and you know really leveraging that data is not something that we all were probably seeing you know earlier on in our careers and it's really been a big change um so the last questions for everyone um what is you know what are really the biggest benefits that organizations are experiencing after adopting these approaches and I think you've all touched a little bit on each of them but you know what are you hearing from the field what do you think is really the the longest lasting and biggest benefit you're seeing yeah I I think as I mentioned it's it's a very nent process right but the steps that we've taken have been very positive and you know we have we're in some really exciting times but we've been changing the tires while the car is moving right um and I think we need to take a breath sometimes and really talk about that strategy what we're going to do going forward 3 69 12 months 1 2 3 years um May 7th we're bringing in our it team and our data operations group into the NSF headquarters and really just have a strategy day close the door shut down your email I know that's hard but we have to do it and just really start thinking about what the next thing is where are we in the AI implementation where are we in automation what are the things that we could do to help our customers our colleagues our our other employees in order to do you know help them do their job better and I think people are starting to understand that we are the professionals in that in that sphere and and that's a difficult thing to acknowledge when you've been kind of on your own for a number of years and and we're very you know our Office of Management was created in 2018 uh before that it was you know Mission support was really distributed across the office so we're still a learning organization but in that regard we have the opportunity to create something that's really never been done before and I think that's the the piece that really excites people yeah that's I mean that's a big impact creating something that's brand new right Chris did you have something to add there uh yes I think for us because our is nent we're not seeing some of the immediate benefits you would hope to see from an overall experience model but the biggest benefit I think we've seen so far is cultural I mean because we're moving from a model where kind of the standard Army experience has been needs of the army selfless service you will do it execute as ordered essentially right well we're pulling that back a little bit and we're really taking some work in understanding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation what calls people to do certain types of work and what makes them really good at it in order to build the broadest and deepest Talent bench for the United States Army that we can possibly build these are things we have to take into account and shape and incentivize for our people to go and build and develop and succeed and execute the way that we need them to so for us just getting the culture changed where we're not looking at people as interchangeable cogs where we're looking at how many of what type but where we're instead really delving deep into the data and into the person and asking who this person is is an incredible change and we're very excited about where it's taking us I think for D the biggest benefit is yet to be realized however there's a tension in getting there uh traditionally we've delivered in more siloed Fashions than we have trying to do now it's causing us as an agency as an organization to think more holistically to deliver Enterprise capabilities I think the benefit on the back end and we're starting to realize it not without some heavy sledding is that we'll be able to reduce the it inventory reduce costs uh deliver a common user experience across multiple platforms that's seamless but I don't want it to be lost that that's there's some real challenges in getting there for us but that benefit is yet to come but I believe we'll get there all right so we're definitely seeing short and long-term benefits to adopting this model we build a an employee recognition application on service now uh SE to be low hanging fruit uh basically moving a small PDF form into an automated fashion and you would think that that would have low benefit to the organization something easy to implement but after submission employee submissions of awards went up 43% 92% increase in maximum amount of award allocations to employees and believe it or not FB scores for that particular area Skyrock it as well so we're we're definitely seeing short-term benefits the employees are feeling it the customers are feeling it so this this is a journey and as we stood up this new CBP experience division within our organization I think we'll see successes over the next couple years I bet and I mean sometimes it's just those small changes and the accessibility of a of a simple form can sounds like have a real much larger impact than you think it really would in the first place absolutely well I've really enjoyed all of your your discussion and your answers today and look forward to continuing on this uh Journey with with all four of you so thank thanks for your time today