The General Services Administration (GSA) is recommending agencies to evaluate their contact centers through “secret shoppers” who will interact with customer service representatives as members of the public.
GSA said Thursday that its Contact Center – Center of Excellence developed the evaluation process to help agencies assess their capacity to meet customer experience requirements such as competency, consistency and sufficiency of product and service information through an "unbiased and unfiltered" lens.
The process is also meant to evaluate timeliness, workflow processes and coordination between contact points, according to GSA. In addition, the initiative is designed to enable agencies to identify their “pain points” or areas for CX improvement as well as strengths and competencies.
“These initiatives may be technological, workforce-related, operational, or all of the above,” GSA noted. “Next steps may include updating training materials, retraining staff to better handle topics that were poorly addressed during mystery calls, routing calls in a more efficient manner to meet customer’s specific needs, and creating more or different contact channels.”