Signature Initiative - Service 1: Online Service

Online, integrated customer service

Other Information:

Initiative: GSA Connect Description: GSA Connect will be an online collaborative knowledgebase to answer customers’ top questions about GSA. This GSA-wide system will allow our customers to quickly find answers from the Web or mobile devices, and will be integrated with social media. GSA Connect will help our customers get the information they need faster by accessing a central place for top answers, rather than having to wade through multiple websites and web pages. This will be done by leveraging users’ ratings and rankings of information they find to be most helpful, and then displaying the most popular / useful answers first. GSA Connect will not only make access to information easier, it will also create an ongoing dialog between GSA and its customers, that will help us better understand our customers’ needs and priorities. The system will also be integrated with social media so people can easily access answers via GSA’s Facebook pages and other places where people already spend so much time on the Web. Ultimately, GSA Connect will be a more cost efficient way of providing quick answers to our top customer requests, by reducing call center volume and other routine inquiries. To keep cost and implementation efforts low, GSA Connect will leverage our previous investments in Internet ―cloud‖ based, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology. Initially, GSA Connect will be used to improve the frequently asked questions (FAQs) on GSA.gov. Future phases will integrate GSA connect into GSA call-center and customer relationship management programs. GSAConnect will also leverage the success of the USA.gov knowledge base, which is a separate program that manages top questions and answers from the public about government-wide programs. We will take lessons learned from that program, as well as review similar systems used by other federal agencies. Challenges: Given the current budget constraints, GSA Connect is dependent upon funding and resource availability. Other challenges include: * Confirming the capabilities of selected technology platform and ensuring funding is available to develop it; * Working across our agency to gather and consolidate all the questions and answers; * Ensuring that answers are consistent and kept up-to-date; * Ensuring questions and answers are in plain language; * Regularly tracking performance measures and making improvements based on customer feedback and; * Refining the governance, and roles and responsibilities for maintaining content. Performance Measures: * Decrease number of call center calls and emails for routine questions * User ratings of FAQs (whether the FAQs were rated useful and easy to understand) * Increase traffic to the Knowledge base * Gather user feedback on information Milestones/Featured Actions: * October 30, 2011 - Create answers to the most frequently asked questions across GSA * Complete - Conduct market research of commercial systems * October 30, 2011 - Estimate high level functional requirements and effort * November 30, 2011 - Assemble project team and begin development * February 28, 2012 - Complete development of beta forGSA.gov FAQ system * March 30, 2012 - Complete testing and make ―live‖

Stakeholder(s):

• The Public: Customers: The public seeking information; our employees; private businesses, federal agencies, and state and local governments. Customer Demographics/Segmentation: * GSA has contracts with over 5,000 companies through its schedules program * GSA performs services for all Federal Agencies * For the first half of FY 2011, GSA -- took 675,000 calls from citizens -- answered 51,000 emails and 11,000 chat sessions from citizens -- had over 40 million website, and 325,000 mobile site visits distributed over 17 million publications


• GSA Employees


• Private Businesses


• Federal Agencies


• State Governments


• Local Governments


• Martha Dorris: POC: Martha Dorris U.S. General Services Administration martha.dorris@gsa.gov

Objective(s):

1

Content