LCG:Impact Returns with a Night Out for Employee Recognition

Posted on December 8, 2022June 7, 2024 by Alix Ganga

Employees across the company and country gathered on December 7, 2022 at the Marriott Convention Center in Bethesda, Maryland for the first in-person company-wide event since before the pandemic. The night brought co-workers together and gave the LCG leadership team the opportunity to share their vision for the future. The high point of the evening was recognition of outstanding employees and teams.

The following individuals and teams were recognized for their contribution to helping LCG empower federal government agencies to create extraordinary change over the past year.

Directors Award

Cindy Griesbach

Ravi Kosuri

Most Percipio Badges

Priscilla Compian

Most LCG Certifications

Naveen Lanke – 1st place

Ravi Kosuri – 1st runner-up

Nishant Chadha – 2nd runner-up

David Montgomery – 2nd runner-up

Hima Poonadathu – 2nd runner-up

Karthik Ramamurthi – 2nd runner-up

MVP Award

Ashwini Bachu

Kenneth Bergman

Christal Carter

Matthew Favilla

Ravi Kosuri

Sebastien Morizet

Ehab Rashed

Isaac Rodriguez

Ashley Staten

Sree Pallavi Thota

Innovation Award Team

Office of the PMO: Murad Abbasov & Ashley Staten

Digital Transformation Award

LCG IT Department: Ehab Rashed, Ezell Taylor & Daniel Trencher

IMPACT Customer Service Award

LCG Grants Services Team: Tasbeeh Badi, Taha Badi, Emily Behles, Ephrem Bekele, Nishant Chadha, Stephanie Cook McDaniel, Benjamin Farrow, Althea Gautier, Leslie Green, Deborah Halpern, Jasmine Hanonu, Mary Jackson, Clarise Jackson-Hal,l Kaira Johnson, Lavonnia Jones, Karthik Kalvakollu, Maura Kephart, Chan Young (Scott) Kim, Nawsheen Laila, Sebastien Morizet, Hima Poonadathu, Nandita Prasad, Karthik Ramamurthi, Shruthi Seelesh, Allison Stanfill, John Stewart Rukeyser, Daaimah Titarine, Kateri Tucker, Sarah Valle, Swapna Priya Vuyyuru, Tracey Walker, Jennifer Webber, LaTania Williams, Ephrem Zelelew, Reem Akkad, Armand Olivier Amany, Priscilla Compian, Juleesa Davis, Sarah Frey, Juan Granados Umanzor, Shatema Hardy, Brittany Holland, Amanda McGill, Tiesha McKeithan, Aaron Foisi Nmungwun, Lisa Scott, Jacinda Smith, & Grady Grace Wani

Several employees received multiple awards including Nishant Chadha, Priscilla Compian, Ravi Kosuri, Sebastien Morizet, Hima Poonadathu, Karthic Ramamurthi, Ehab Rashed & Ashley Staten.

Congratulations to all award winners.

Enhance User Experience with Focused Self-Service Metrics

Posted on September 17, 2021October 27, 2021 by Alix Ganga

IT service management (ITSM) maturity and adoption of best practices varies across Federal IT organizations. Over the years, visionary Federal leaders with insight into the value and benefits along with the ability to influence acquisition strategies have enabled the adoption of ITSM tools and practices in many agencies. Industry partners assist in advising, implementing, and advancing ITSM capabilities for greater efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, and improved user satisfaction.

Self-service (Tier 0, Level 0) capabilities enable users to solve issues without contacting a Service Desk. Portals implementing self service capabilities contain features such as:

Service Catalog with Service Request functions
Incident Ticket creation
Knowledge Base with reference documents, tutorials,
Collaboration Forums
Chat functions with live or virtual agents

Incorporating self-service capabilities as part of the Service Desk creates a significant enabler of improved user satisfaction and productivity. Traditional Service Desk metrics fail to measure the value and benefits of self-service contact channels. Traditional Service Desk metrics primarily focus on call volume and agent productivity. Introducing self service capabilities requires new metrics for monitoring adoption and informing decisions.

Careful definition, collection, monitoring, and reporting of self-service specific metrics have shown:

Increased availability and efficiency
Faster incident resolution
Faster request fulfillment
Productivity improvements
Reduced costs
Happier users

Insight

Traditional Service Desk metrics fail to measure the value and benefits of self-service contact channels.

Impact

Assess your organization’s self-service critical success factors to identify the appropriate measures for continual evaluation and monitoring.

A Deep Dive

Awareness and usability influence the realization of these benefits. Metrics provide evidence for recognizing the benefits of self service capabilities, while also providing the insight necessary to know when an organization can make improvements. An organization need to measure the Self Service capabilities to understand it’s true effect on the overall Service Desk experience. Exhibit 1 suggests a few new metrics to consider when adopting self-service capabilities.

Exhibit 1. Potential CSFs and KPIs for Assessing Self-service Results

CSF	KPI	Desired Trend
Reduces Costs	Cost per Contact	Downward
Users Find Solutions	Self-Service Success Rate Self-Service Failure Rate	Upward Downward
Faster Than Phone or Email	Fulfillment Time	Downward or Stable
Meets Needs	Satisfaction	Upward or Stable

CSF: Reduces Costs

Tracking ‘cost per call’ provides valuable information for a primarily telephone-based Service Desk. The introduction of self-service capabilities creates an omnichannel Service Desk and triggers the need to track costs associated with each contact method.

Insightful reports show cost trends for each channel, like that shown in Exhibit 2.

Implementing tracking for Self Service gives the accurate cost breakdown between all aspects of the Service Desk. An organization might see a reduction of cost across the average cost per contact.

Exhibit 2. Example Cost per Contact Trend Report

CSF: Users Find Solutions

Measuring the success rate for users leveraging self service capabilities to track incidents and requests provides valuable, but only partial, insight. Consider the situation where only a small portion of users achieve success in finding solutions using self-service, but a sizable portion of users with the same issue call the Service Desk instead.

Intuitively, one might assume a directly inverse relationship between self-service support channel success and failure rates. However, the scope of each metric is significantly different and requires careful attention to the details.

CSF: Faster Than Phone or Email

Users naturally and consistently return to effective, efficient, and successful methods of accomplishing tasks. When users perceive self-service as faster and easier than calling or emailing the Service Desk, adoption increases and improves benefit realization.

CSF: Meets Needs

In addition to satisfying the needs of users, a self-service implementation must also satisfy the sponsor’s need for realizing a return on the investment. For this reason, Service Managers must monitor both the user’s and the sponsor’s perception of value delivered by the self-service channels

User experience metrics provide information about these perceptions and require capture across all support channels. Monitoring trends assist in identifying pain points for further investigation as well as raising awareness of needed course adjustments.

Continual assessment of sponsor perception assists in proactively responding to concerns to making necessary adjustments.

Looking Forward

Establishing a baseline set of self-service metrics enables continual monitoring as the service organization explores and implements customer experience (CX) advancements such as chatbots, Virtual Assistants, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The implementation of self-service capabilities significantly influences traditional Service Desk metrics causing a need to adjust expectations and targets. A future article will dive into how self-service should affect trends in Service Desk metrics like lowering First Call Resolution Rates (FCRR) and why that should be the desired affect.

LCG and You, Supporting Our First Responders in the Fight Against COVID-19

Posted on October 20, 2020February 11, 2021 by Alix Ganga

First responders and healthcare professionals are on the front lines providing support to communities in the metropolitan District-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has placed unprecedented demands on the health care system; this has caused shortages in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Together, LCG assisted first responders, healthcare professionals, and community groups to safely fight this virus and help those risking their lives to protect us.

On Saturday, September 26th, LCG staffers and their family members laced up their sneakers or put air in their bicycle tires to participate in LCG’s Virtual 5k Walk-Run-Bike fundraiser.

LCG in partnership with the First Responders Children’s Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund hosted a Virtual 5K Walk-Run-Bike fundraiser. These funds will go to purchase and dissemination of PPEs to first responders, healthcare professionals and community groups in the DMV. LCG matched the amount raised by each employee through the fundraiser.

LOCATION: WHERE WAS THE VIRTUAL 5K WALK-RUN-BIKE HELD?

Similar to LCG’s “Work from Home Policy”, this event was held at local parks, bike and walking trails and communities throughout the DMV. To ensure safe-distancing and to avoid large crowds, each participant identified a favorite location in their community where they can engage in a 5K walk, run or bike ride. The chosen activity took place throughout the day of September 26th.

HOW WILL THESE DONATIONS HELP FIRST RESPONDERS IN THE DMV?

To date, through the First Responders Children’s Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund, 17 grants have been made in Maryland and 139 in Virginia to assist with the purchase of PPEs. The COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund has also joined forces with the VA Highway Patrol to help in the distribution of the PPE supplies.