Improving Customer Service for Veterans With Strategy and Planning
Educating service providers to better understand the Veterans they serve
DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS
The Challenge
Create an effective professional development program to find, train and keep federal employees who serve the Veteran community.
The Impact
Improved satisfaction among Veterans receiving VA services, as those employees receive effective and function-specific training that closes skill and knowledge gaps.
The Outcome
Created professional development methodology and training enabling federal employees to flourish and advance in their roles serving VA customers.
The Bowen Group helped improve satisfaction among the 9 million Veterans receiving VA services each year. Veteran service provider employees continue to benefit from the Bowen analysis, strategies and planning with career development resulting in lateral or upward professional growth.
Team Bowen facilitated 10 focus groups to analyze the current service provider employee training needs. The team developed nine general and 19 technical descriptions each for a different administrative skill. They then evaluated and mapped more than 200 courses to those skills, based on alignment and ability, to close skill and knowledge gaps.
In addition, the Bowen team designed, developed, delivered and evaluated 20 webinars to capture data from the employees who took the learning courses to determine what training the employees needed. They followed these up by designing and developing 22 training support tools for the Veteran service provider employees and managers to assess organizational and individual skill level needs. After capturing data from 272 participants, the team used the results to identify impactful ways to improve the training environment.