Tuesday, February 09, 2010

The New USAJobs – Great Customer Service!

And the award for Best Customer Service goes to…USAJobs! Finally – a federal agency (the Office of Personnel Management) that really, really listened to its audience and gave us what we want. Plain. Simple. To the point.

The new USAJobs website looks like Google. It’s a stripped-down version of its former self (which really wasn’t too bad). It recognizes that people want to do one basic thing when they visit: find government jobs. Yes, you can still get background information about working for the federal government. Yes, if you are you in a special audience group - veteran, student, person with disabilities – there’s a link right there for you, front and center. But nothing gets in the way of that single top task: find a job.

No trouble seeing where you should go first. No overwhelming long lists of choices. No unnecessary photos or graphics to distract us. We don’t have to wind our way through what the agency thinks we should know or news about what the agency is doing.

And when you go to second level pages, they’re just as easy to use and understand. They anticipate audience questions, without explaining every tiny esoteric little nuance or potential exception, ad nauseum.

What a breath of fresh air! What a terrific model for other agencies. You listened.  You got it.  You delivered what we want, in ways that make sense to us.  Now that's what I call good customer service! Very well done, OPM.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the feedback! I can tell you we spent a good deal of time systematically going through information pages on the old site and arranging them as intuitively as we could. We used aggregate usage statistics to help guide our choices, as well as some focus group feedback to refine them. We realize there was a lot to like about the previous version, but people consistently rated it as cluttered and confusing. The challenge was never having too little information!

Next up, we are working with agencies to improve more pervasive aspects of job seeker experience (especially the application process and status notifications). The site refresh was cosmetic with regard to the overall hiring process, but I can assure you we are working on that as well, and the new site is intended to signal our commitment to improving seeker experience.

- USAJOBSer

katty said...

Great post! Customer service is going to be the biggest thing happening to the business world. Thumbs up for those who gave good service! They deserve free publicity..
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Unknown said...

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