VA IT -2017 Year In Review

Stabilizing and Streamlining Our Core Processes and Platforms

IT core processes and platforms form the backbone of VA.

The work we do behind the scenes supports critical functions across the Department and ensures smooth interactions between systems for a better Veteran experience. In 2017, we took a hard look at improving our core processes. From our help desk support to financial management, from providing laptops to employees to consolidating data centers, and from decreasing our physical building footprint to expanding our cloud footprint, we’ve made tremendous progress.

Enterprise Service Desk

For our employees to successfully serve our Veterans, they need VA’s technology to work. While we strive to set them up for immediate success, sometimes technology fails and our employees need support. When that happens, we want to quickly and seamlessly resolve the issue and get our employees back to work. In 2017, we strove to make receiving IT support significantly easier.

Many VA employees found the National Service Desk confusing; multiple layers and complicated options made navigating our IT help desk a headache. VA made its voice heard, and we listened.

In May 2017, we renamed this service the Enterprise Service Desk (ESD) and launched an enhanced and streamlined ESD menu — the Automated Attendant. This automated menu presents users with intuitive options that align to the most frequent requests for IT support, getting callers to a specialized agent faster.

The automated attendant feature also made it easier for agents to resolve issues during the first conversation and, if needed, escalate the issue directly to the appropriate subject matter expert for resolution. Our goal is to reach 65 percent first-call resolution. We are achieving efficiencies by standardizing our processes to provide the best IT support in the shortest amount of time, keeping VA employees connected to the systems they need to provide unmatched service to our nation’s Veterans.

Our customers noticed.

The 2017 OIT Customer Satisfaction Survey showed that ESD improved its American Customer Satisfaction Index score five points, from a 76 to an 81, in just one year.

2017 OIT Customer Satisfaction Survey

The biggest improvement came from support personnel’s professionalism (86, a five-point improvement from 2016), agent knowledge and expertise (81, a four-point improvement from 2016), and ESD’s timely response to calls or emails (80, a four-point improvement from 2016)