VBA embracing organizational transformation to enhance customer experience

In 2021, the Veterans Benefits Administration’s (VBA), Office of Human Capital Services (HCS), was faced with the imminent passage of the PACT Act, the largest expansion of health care and benefits in VA history. The passage of the PACT Act required increasing VBA’s workforce to the largest number in its history, and a significant shift in the way VBA approached, delivered and enhanced the customer experience. It also created an opportunity for VBA to improve its hiring practices and redesign the marketing and outreach efforts to fill critical vacancies nationwide.

As VBA’s overarching Human Resources (HR) office, HCS would be responsible for hiring thousands of new employees nationwide to carryout VBA’s mission as claims processors, administrative specialists, and in other key support services—ensuring that VBA had the right people in the right positions with the proper skills to provide the benefits and services that Veterans deserve.

Hiring the right people

In response to the PACT Act, HCS’s executive leadership team—led by Dr. Aaron M. Lee, executive director—prioritized transforming VBA into an organizational center of excellence for human capital delivery. Over the past two and a half years, HCS has revolutionized human capital delivery across VBA while focusing on being a customer-centric organization. This included maximizing all hiring options and programs for recruitment, relocation, and retention of candidates and employees, actively implementing targeted recruitment and marketing campaigns; using a combination of Direct Hiring Authorities and targeted marketing to recruit interns, recent graduates, post-secondary students, Veterans and military spouses; and increasing outreach with Educational Institutions and special emphasis groups.

HCS made marketing and outreach a priority by partnering with local and underserved communities and using a combination of targeted job announcements in key cities, as well as open and continuous announcements nationwide to help build a large pool of qualified applicants. This included partnering with VA Careers to promote current vacancies and to tap into their robust following across all social media platforms, allowing their followers to learn more about a rewarding career at VBA and share it within their networks.

When it came to the PACT Act, VBA adapted this growth mindset to implement best practices and develop new strategies to streamline hiring and improve retention. This included the development of the Federal Surge Hiring Model, which led to historic growth in VBA’s workforce with approximately 14,000 employees hired, a 57.2% increase that brought the total number of VBA employees to 33,400. VBA was praised by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for achieving its best Time-to-Hire, which tracks how long it takes for agencies to fill a vacancy. This innovative approach to hiring and training has ensured VBA is on track to meet its FY 2024 goal — building our workforce to 36,000 employees.

Enhancing the customer experience

Customer-centricity is the heart of an exceptional customer experience. But how do you transform an organization to prioritize customer service across every level?

Our approach required a unique balance between improving organizational performance, driving innovation and change, and sustaining improvements over time. VBA identified three key drivers of success in transforming human capital delivery with a focus on becoming a customer-centric organization.

1. Focus on the customer

The first step in organizational change involves embracing the core tenets of customer service—listening to and understanding customer needs to provide a personalized experience along every step of their journey.

Across VBA, we developed strategic leadership philosophies that outlined the way we support and engage our customers, from ensuring alignment with VA strategic goals to establishing organizational core values built on the four pillars of customer service: consistency, agility, accountability, and responsiveness. Most importantly, VBA shifted its focus entirely in its delivery of human capital services through Lee’s creation of a customized Customer Experience Model called LIFT, which involves listening, improving, facilitating and transforming the customer experience to deliver exceptional customer service while continuously improving satisfaction.

2. Focus on the culture

Another important facet of organizational transformation is changing culture—the shared values and beliefs that guide purpose and outcomes—as the key driver of high-performing organizations. When successfully aligned with leadership and strategy, culture can drive long-term results, build resilience and adaptability and cultivate an open, transparent environment that emphasizes employee well-being.

Within VBA, changing the culture involved creating a unified vision for success by becoming an organizational center of excellence for human capital best practices. Human capital serves as the foundation from which organizational culture is built, and VBA recognized that the best way to drive high-performance and produce quality products and services was to invest in its people. As a result, VBA began prioritizing employee development, well-being and satisfaction through employee engagement initiatives, programs, events and internal climate surveys.

This included establishing VBA’s first Work-Life Wellness and Employee Experience Office to increase employee satisfaction, engagement, morale and retention throughout VBA, as well as implementing the Stay in VBA program—VBA’s #1 employee engagement and retention strategy that continues to serve as an employee retention best practice. This comprehensive approach to employee well-being and engagement fosters a healthy work environment while ensuring the culture resonates with employees in a way that makes them feel seen, heard and valued.

3. Remain committed to growth

While organizational transformation is possible, it requires a long-term commitment to continuous growth. Part of a successful transformation hinges on having the necessary processes, resources and support. The other part is being capable—and ready—to adapt to change.

After implementing a customer-centric approach to business, VBA remains dedicated to embracing innovation, making customer-driven performance improvements in response to feedback and insight, staying responsive to the evolving needs of its customers, and revolutionizing human capital delivery across VBA. This approach ensures our employees are focused on consistently providing outstanding products and services and are inspired to go above and beyond to exceed customers’ needs.

In large part due to our successes with hiring, employee development and retention, VA was also identified by the Partnership for Public Service as one of the best places to work in Federal Government.

Impact

Organizational transformation is an ongoing process that helps to identify opportunities for improvement, and if done successfully, can have a substantial positive impact on employees and customers.

“Our team studied the 3 ‘Es’ of customer experience (ease, effectiveness and emotion) to build strategic partnerships with our customers. This effort was vital in building a collaboration that produced historic hiring results,” Lee said.

Although VBA transformed into a customer-centric organization to meet PACT Act hiring goals, it was its willingness to keep transforming that ultimately continues to enable its success. HCS proudly manages the full employee life cycle along every stage of a career journey—making supporting hiring efforts its top priority to help with disability claims processing, improve the customer experience, and providing VBA employees with consistent, reliable and timely HR support and expertise, all while keeping VBA a competitive employer.

This hiring initiative haas increased productivity over the past year. On March 1, 2024, VBA processed its one-millionth claim. This is the fastest—by a month and a half—that we have achieved this number of rating completions in VBA history. As of March 10, VBA completed 1,060,778 claims, 33.2% greater than this point in FY23. VBA achieved its highest output month ever for January 2024 with 221,592 claims completed in a single month, and the first time over 200K ever. With this milestone, VBA’s top 10 best claims production months in administration history have all happened in the last 12 months. VA has processed more than 9,000 Veteran claims in one day 43 different times this fiscal year and over 10,000 Veteran claims in one day 33 times. Prior to this achievement, VA had processed more than 9,000 claims in one day only three times in VA’s history. Finally, our National Call Center has answered 3,712,882 calls this fiscal year to date, with an average speed to answer of 1 minute 21 seconds; these numbers represent 995,857 more calls compared to the same period last year and a reduced average speed to answer of more than 13 minutes.