FORT BELVOIR, Va. –
More than 50 customer-facing employees from across the Defense Logistics Agency met in person and online for a three-day Customer Service Management Summit in November. The attendees included customer account specialists from the six major subordinate commands, business program analysts, site integrators, division chiefs and DLA Customer Interaction Center representatives.
The group focused on developing policy for customer case management and associated customer relationship management metrics.
Sly Ahn, director of customer support for DLA Logistics Operations, kicked off the meeting by reviewing the CRM team’s vision of providing customers and agents with best-in-business experiences.
Employees shared their best practices and ideas for improving and standardizing case management. The agency’s customer-facing team refers to phone, email and web interactions with customers as cases, which are tracked through the CSM application.
Coming up with standardized metrics is a tough task, said John Sarnosky, a CRM management and program analyst.
“Because each MSC manages customer cases differently, it will be difficult to develop standardized metrics that are fair yet challenging for all. Despite this, we were able to agree on a data-supported baseline metric that will be discussed at future leadership forums for concurrence,” he said.
While CIC agents and customer account specialists regularly use CSM, the goal is to increase the number of CSM users and improve the quality of information and overall efficiency of customer services.
“Although we only had representation from a couple from the MSC supplier operations directorates, they seemed very willing to use ServiceNow to manage post award requests and see how it can help reduce their workload while improving customer service,” Sarnosky added.
Marianne Lumsden, CSM product owner, also presented a timeline for new CSM capabilities in ServiceNow that will be rolled out incrementally in 2024. The new tools are expected to modernize and improve customers’ experience and include: Virtual Agent, Live Chat, Engagement Messenger and a Self-Help Customer Portal.
The next summit is being planned for late-January 2024.