Ambassador Blog

By, Gilbert Guillen, Social Security Administration

As a public servant and a citizen, I know first-hand that American’s want their problems solved quickly, clearly and courteously. In government, just as in the private sector, customer service has to be a priority. Easier said than done.

In any organization it is often a challenge to determine the best, most efficient ways to engage citizens, determine their satisfaction levels, and identify areas in need of improvement, all while rallying team members to provide great service.  

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is a very public facing organization. In FY 2010, our 1300 offices assisted approximately 45 million visitors, our call center answered over 67 million telephone calls and the SSA.gov home page was visited 134 million times. As you can see, interacting and communicating effectively with the public is a critical component of SSA’s work.

To streamline the delivery of information and ensure that citizens receive accurate answers to inquiries, the SSA employs an online FAQ knowledgebase. Our FAQ site is dynamic—not static. We understand that we need a sophisticated Q&A system that allows our customers to hone in on specific topics of interest, get an answer and get out quickly while minimizing the likelihood of contacting a live agent for assistance.

Last year SSA’s FAQs were viewed 35 million times. This tells us that the impact of our FAQs is hugely significant. Just imagine if those questions had been asked first to a field agent?

I’ve been managing the SSA FAQ team for a little over two years, and when I first came on board, the objective handed over to us was to create a uniform, accurate database to increase self-service to the public. Since the FAQ knowledgebase already existed, my team and I were convinced that the objective was already met and that all we needed to do was to manage the FAQs-- but of course, this wasn’t the case. One of the main reasons we knew that the mission wasn’t accomplished yet because of one simple question, “Did the link that you clicked take you to the answer that you expected?”  When we asked users this question, too often, the answer to this questions was “no”.

So we wondered, if people aren’t getting to the ‘right’ answer, then why are we getting so many views? Well, the answer was simple. Citizens kept coming back to us because we are the only Social Security Administration. The public did not—and does not—have another resource to get answers to these questions. This fact challenged us to figure out a better way to engage citizens and to meet their expectations.

We realized that we already had access to an enormous amount of user feedback that SSA had been collecting, but that wasn’t being analyzed. In addition, the FAQ knowledgebase software provided an interactive survey tool. Once we realized that we had these two streams of user feedback, we began digging in to see what users had to say about our FAQs. What we discovered was that many people felt that our content was organization centric. In other words, we were telling people what we wanted them to know, not what they wanted to know.

Since SSA’s role is service delivery, we recognized that we had to redefine our FAQs to meet the public’s goals. Our goal could no longer be about creating a uniform, accurate, centralized, searchable database of questions and answers.  It had to be about making sure our database of questions and answers helped the public accomplish their tasks.  This meant we had to engage the public actively to find out if we were meeting their expectations.  By utilizing a simple survey feedback tool within the FAQ knowledgebase provided the information we needed to modify our services accordingly.

In conclusion, we shifted our focus, aiming to ensure that our FAQ knowledgebase was truly citizen centric. Through this process, it became crystal clear that every project had to be aligned with how it helps the user achieve their goals. If a proposed project doesn’t meet this criterion then it is moved down the priority list. For us, the measure of our success is how successful we are in helping the citizen to achieve their goal.