The General Services Administration\u2019s Center of Excellence partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture will focus efforts on consolidating the USDA\u2019s contact centers to create an \u201comni-channel\u201d experience for farmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Previous work on the center focused on allowing the department to see call intake, web and chat bot engagement in a centralized place, which Anil Cheriyan, director of the Technology Transformation Services, called \u201cstate-of-the-art.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cheriyan said that that was just the beginning of the work on the program. This next year, GSA and USDA want to consolidate several mission areas into new contact center. Cheriyan said he didn\u2019t know how many would fold into the central contact center, but said there was \u201cprobably\u201d about 35 contact centers across USDA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The key for the project is to give USDA customers a single place to go, no matter which internal component they are seeking out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re a citizen, you don\u2019t want to be bounced around with your phone calls for every single question that you might have because the expertise lies in different areas,\u201d Cheriyan told reporters Oct. 31 at the USDA\u2019s Impact Expo, which showcased IT projects undertaken by the department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The move, like most new projects within the federal government, doesn\u2019t come without its own workforce challenges associated with the consolidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs you go through that process, you really have got to make sure you\u2019ve got the right teams in the right places with the right ability to answer those questions,\u201d Cheriyan said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a matter of reducing staff; it\u2019s a matter of reusing staff and having them do the right thing in the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to prevent citizens from being bounced around to get answers to their questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":25729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":14,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[104,106,36,31,110,14,33,6],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3242],"class_list":["post-9332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-acquisition-update","category-daily-brief","category-gsa","category-home","category-it-cloud-report","category-it-networks","category-newsletters","category-acquisition"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"W73KQIEYWFHTPDVSNKYIBK3NBE","arc_canonical_url":"\/it-networks\/2019\/10\/31\/usda-will-consolidate-contact-points-for-farmers\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n