At the Public Experience (PX) Contact Center, we recognize the important role of quality in shaping customer interactions. When people call and chat with us, they expect clear, reliable information about government benefits and services. Learn how we work with our contractor to deliver exceptional service to the people who get in touch with the USAGov program and pick up some tips for your program’s contact center.
Comprehensive onboarding
The onboarding process immerses new hires in the contact center’s culture, values, and processes. During an agent’s first week, trainers educate them on the work of USA.gov and USAGov en Español and introduce them to our knowledge base. The agent then moves into a one-week "nesting phase." As needs arise during this time, they receive additional floor support and feedback from their supervisors.
Continuous training and development
A contact center team must prioritize continuous training and development for agents. From advanced technical skills to refined communication techniques, a comprehensive training program ensures the team is always at the top of their game.
We provide ongoing training on specific topics for USAGov agents when there is a decline in performance. For example, if we see a decline in customer satisfaction around passports, one of our most popular topics, the team receives coaching on key content and agency information from the State Department Bureau of Consular Affairs.
Live monitoring, feedback, and quality analysis
Quality assurance is a crucial part of making sure agents are delivering the information people need. We do this through live monitoring and quality analysis of recorded calls and chats. Live monitoring allows supervisors to provide real-time feedback to guide and redirect agents as they’re serving customers.
Quality analysts conduct rigorous audits of customer interactions, providing detailed feedback to agents highlighting their strengths and areas needing improvement. We identify opportunities for USAGov agents to give customers more accurate and complete information. For example, agents are required to provide the referred government agency’s phone number and hours of operation to a customer. This is considered a complete call. But if an agent provides the government agency’s phone number and does not include the hours of operation listed in the knowledge base, that would be considered an incomplete call. This feedback loop between quality analysts, supervisors, and agents fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Weekly calibration meetings
Alignment is important for consistency. Our team schedules weekly calibration meetings to bring together supervisors, quality analysts, and team leaders to review scoring criteria. This ensures uniformity in our quality assessment process and promotes fairness and accuracy in evaluating agent performance. We collaborate with our contractor to listen to live and recent calls and chat inquiries in English and Spanish. During the calibrations, we all provide insight into how we will audit the agents and discuss many different points of view.
Reports and performance reviews
We follow best practices by providing comprehensive performance reports to agents each month, offering insights into their performance metrics and areas for development. The reviews we conduct help agents track their progress and set goals for the future.
Our internal quality team prepares a monthly quality performance report with a visual performance graph for a rolling 12 months. We note areas for improvement and rank agents by performance score, making it easy for our contractor to see the bottom performers so they can take action and see the top performers so they can be recognized.
The overall quality is based on established service level agreements (SLAs), key performance indicators (KPIs), and feedback from customers. In our contract, we established that the overall score for interactions must be at least 94. When there is a month where the goal isn’t met, we perform extensive research to understand why and how to improve performance. We also encourage feedback from our contractor and agents on areas of improvement and concern.
By prioritizing training, feedback, and continuous improvement, we’re sharpening the ability of our contact center agents to answer people’s questions accurately and efficiently. In the future, we may share more about how the PX Contact Center is helping USAGov and other government programs connect people with the government information and services they need.
The PX Contact Center specializes in providing tailored services that can connect people with your agency and elevate customer experience. If you’re part of a federal agency interested in using our contact center program, email PXContactCenter@gsa.gov to explore how we can help.
