Case Study: Perfect Customer Experience Project

GSA's Public Buildings Service (PBS) provides real estate services to the U.S. government. Recently, PBS launched, "The Perfect Customer Experience (PCE)," a nationwide initiative to improve GSA's service to its customers. In response, the PBS New England Region formed a team to create the New England Region PCE Project, to help the Region's employees learn how to deliver the perfect customer experience.

What It Is

The PCE Project helps employees provide first-class customer service by cultivating greater customer loyalty, and fine-tuning the external/internal customer experience. PCE integrates five key principles:

• Respect
• Value
• Expertise
• Ease
• Service Recovery

The Challenge

Deliver a perfect customer experience, to influence how customers think of our organization, and ensure they speak well of us to others when we're not around.

The Solution

Engage employees in a dialogue about providing better customer service, not only as individuals, but as an organization. Create teams, focus groups, best practices, online tools, surveys and business process improvements. Use these tools and conversations to develop a PCE roadmap to sustain the initiative and allow us to continue to deliver a world-class customer experience well into the future.

Results

The PCE project initiated a culture of sharing and storytelling, where team members are rewarded for delivering great service. The PCE project team developed videos on common customer characteristics, created fact sheets, and encouraged employees to take customer experience training. They also:

• Engaged 100% of employees in conversations about customer service
• Integrated customer touchpoints throughout their programs
• Highlighted teams, people and best practices on their intranet
• Encouraged people to nominate peers who deliver PCE
• Trained employees to improve communications
• Created teams to educate peers and respond to customer needs
• Produced a video showcasing the PCE Program (WMV, 16.5 MB, 1 minute, 45 seconds, March 2012)

Resources

The PCE Project team developed fact sheets to improve employee interactions, both with customers and with each other:

• Email Etiquette (PDF, 400 KB, 2 pages, March 2012)
• Meeting Standards (PDF, 223 KB, 3 pages, March 2012)
• Telephone Etiquette (PDF, 494 KB, 1 page, March 2012)
• Voicemail Standards (PDF, 189 KB, 3 pages, March 2012)

The team found these resources helpful when developing their PCE roadmap:

• Becoming Customer Experience Driven
• Perfect Customer Experience Blog
• Customer Respect Management, It's About Time
• Michelli's Blog on Customer Experience
• Businessweek-Customer Experience
• Things You Didn't Learn

Contact Project Manager David Krassnoff, 617-565-8067, with questions or for more information.

Content Lead: David Krassnoff
Page Reviewed/Updated: March 22, 2012