What does it do?

A-11 Section 280 established government-wide practices to mature Federal entities' ability to manage customer experience and service delivery, including streamlining our approach to collecting customer feedback. As the Federal government’s core CX guidance, Section 280 promotes accountability and governance mechanisms to improve service design and quality by:

  • Providing structure and consistency around how agencies/programs approach CX
  • Ensuring Federal service providers are making progress in growing CX program maturity, service definition, and applying leading practices;
  • Ensuring Federal service providers are receiving and acting upon customer feedback to drive performance improvement and service recovery;
  • Ensuring transparency through informed consent and public reporting; and,
  • Encouraging the application of human-centered design as foundational to achieving customer experience outcomes.

High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) were identified due to the scale and impact of their public-facing services, to raise the standard of experience across government. These designated entities must undertake the activities outlined in the guidance, including an annual enterprise-wide CX capacity assessment, focused improvement efforts for designated services, and collecting (and publicly reporting!) customer feedback collections.

HISPs are directed to:

  • Designate two priority services for focused assessment and improvement;
  • Conduct maturity self-assessments against leading practices and discuss this with OMB;
  • Collect customer feedback across government-wide measures in surveys and report quarterly through public facing dashboards; and,
  • Produce CX action plans that are integrated into agency budget and strategy.

What is a High Impact Service Provider or a “HISP?”

High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) are Federal entities that provide (or fund) high impact customer-facing services; they are selected due to a large percentage of the American public served, a high value of annual transactions, or due to the outsized impact on the lives of those served.

What’s in it?

A-11 Section 280 provides a framework for a set of organizational routines and processes related to customer experience, including:

  • How to identify services for improvement;
  • Agency responsibilities for service delivery;
  • How agencies should collect and different types of data; and,
  • How to conduct customer research and navigate the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA).

What’s new in A-11 Section 280?

The 2023 annual update included:

  • Revised submission dates for required deliverables;
  • Simplified structures for transaction surveys and data collection; and,
  • New leading practices for effective management of customer experience, such as the use of web analytics.

What’s the purpose of collecting post-transaction feedback?

In many sectors, the service, even more so than the offering, determines the customer’s satisfaction and the reputation of the organization or brand. Federal Services are defined as the sum of the help provided--by an agency and its partners--throughout the process a customer goes through to obtain, receive, or make use of a public offering (or comply with a policy).

By collecting service transaction feedback, we are developing comparable, government-wide scores that enable cross-agency benchmarking (when relevant), identify those improvements and service elements that most effectively improve trust for different service types, and reduce burden on the public. To see how the VA has learned and improved service delivery by measuring trust, https://www.va.gov/initiatives/veteran-trust-in-va/.

What are the deadlines?

Details about the submission dates and how to manage customer experience can be found in Section 280.12.