Centers of Excellence - Customer Experience Specialist

Centers of Excellence is hiring for GS-15 - Customer Experience Specialist. This page contains information related to the role as well as a link to submit your application. Check out Join TTS Hiring Process to learn more about the application process.

Location: Washington, DC

Salary Range: The base salary range for this position is: GS-15 Step 1 - $142,701 to GS-15 Step 10 $170,800

Please note the maximum salary available for the GS pay system is $170,800

You can find more information about this in the compensation and benefits section on our site.

For specific details on locality pay, please visit OPM’s Salaries & Wages page or for a salary calculator OPM’s 2020 General Schedule (GS) Salary Calculator.

Who May Apply: All United States citizens and nationals (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands) and applicants must not be GSA employees or contractors

Role Summary:

Customer Experience Specialist - GS-15

As a Customer Experience Specialist with the IT Modernization Centers of Excellence (CoE), you will lead the effort to help agencies develop a deep understanding of their customers and their customers’ needs.

You will lead research activities and analyze the results. You will produce and present concepts and collaborate with developers and product managers to build and test those concepts. You will foster best practices in human-centered design within the CoEs and across the federal government.

You will align stakeholders and interview agency customers. You will transform vague ideas into concrete solutions. You will use techniques like contextual inquiry, journey mapping and design studios to minimize risk. And you’ll do all this in a spirit of partnership, with a sense of humility and empathy for our partner agencies and the people who use their systems.

To be successful, you’ll need consulting experience with exceptional stakeholder management skills and a background in human-centered design that includes expertise in service design, user experience design, content strategy or user research. Product management or digital strategy experience will also come in handy.

Key Objectives

1. Lead cross-functional teams that define problems and provide solutions for all phases of the customer experience lifecycle.

• Facilitate: Navigate complex organizational relationships to bring stakeholders together around common goals and priorities.
• Research: Design, conduct and analyze usability testing and other forms of research with customers. Lead design workshops, contextual inquiry, diary studies and stakeholder interviews.
• Design: Lead design activities such as journey mapping, experience prototyping and the development of service blueprints.
• Document: Organize complex information and communicate structure with wireframes, sitemaps and process flows.

2. Share your customer experience knowledge with stakeholders, agency staff and your own CoE teammates.

• Advocate: Champion customers and protect their interests.
• Inform: Create compelling case studies that detail how customer needs have been addressed.
• Model: Act with integrity and inspire honesty through transparency.
• Coach: Practice and enthusiastically share agile, lean and human-centered design practices.
• Investigate: Analyze customer experience approaches (e.g. strategies, roadmaps, playbooks) that represent best practices in the federal government.

3. Provide exceptional service to stakeholders and their agencies.

• Translate: Define problems and describe solutions using the language of your stakeholders, adjusting explanations to their level of technical sophistication.
• Intermediate: Serve as a liaison between stakeholders and project teams.
• Diagnose: Analyze stakeholder needs and identify services that best address them.
• Inspire: Help maintain a safe, inclusive workplace and a positive team culture where all team members value diversity and respect individual differences.

Basic Information

Location: Washington, DC

Salary Range: Base salary GS-15 - $142,701 to $170,800

If you are a new federal employee, your starting salary will likely be set at the Step 1 of the grade for which you are selected. Total compensation may include locality pay based on the individual’s duty location. For more salary information including locality pay details, please visit OPM’s Salaries & Wages page.

Who May Apply: All United States citizens and nationals (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands) and applicants must not be GSA employees or contractors

Job announcement number: tbd

Opening and closing period for this job application: tbd EDT to tbd EDT

Job Title: Innovation Specialist

Series & Grade: 0301 - 15

Promotion Potential: GS-15

Number of vacancies: 1 (Additional vacancies may be filled from this announcement as needed)

Supervisory status: NO

Travel requirement: Occasional travel may be required up to 10%-20% per year

Security clearance: Public trust. Background investigation required.

Work Schedule: Full time

Appointment Type: Excepted Service: Not to exceed 24 months (2 years); may be extended for an additional 2 years for a maximum of 4 years total.

Job Summary

This is a Schedule A position under 5 CFR 213.3102(r) to hire unique technical skills to develop innovative digital tools and services in the Excepted Services, US Digital Service 18F Fellowship Program. The 18F office is charged with developing innovative digital tools and services and uses lean startup and agile development principles to collaborate with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve how government serves the public through technology.

As an Innovation Specialist, the team member serves the government and makes an impact on a massive scale. The position requires that fellows perform work of an exceptional degree of difficulty across a wide range of topics at the convergence of technology, policy, and delivery. The incumbent leverages their experience deploying high quality, user centric platforms and services to lead major initiatives, consult on systems and policy proposal, and provide technical, policy, and programmatic guidance to government.

This position is located within the General Services Administration (GSA), Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), Technology Transformation Service (TTS), Office of Clients & Markets, CoE Division.

GSA has been repeatedly named as one of the ‘Best Places to Work’ in the federal government. You will have access to many benefits including:

• Health insurance (choose from a wide range of plans)
• Life insurance coverage with several options
• Sick leave and vacation time, including 10 paid holidays per year
• Thrift Savings Plan (similar to a 401(k) plan)
• Flexible work schedules and telework
• Transit and child care subsidies
• Training and development
• Flexible spending accounts
• Long-term care insurance
• Training and development

Key Requirements

1. You must be a U.S. Citizen or National (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands)
2. Suitable for federal employment, determined by a background investigation
3. You may be required to serve a trial period
4. Direct Deposit of salary check to financial organization required
5. Register with Selective Service, if you are required by https://www.sss.gov/Registration-Info/Who-Registration

Employment Requirements

• Serve a one year trial period, if required
• Undergo and pass a background investigation. You must be granted this clearance before you can start the job
• Have your identity and work status eligibility verified if you are not a GSA employee. We will use the Department of Homeland Security’s e-Verify system for this
• Any discrepancies must be resolved as a condition of continued employment
• Complete a financial disclosure report to verify that no conflict, or an appearance of conflict, exists between your financial interest and this position

Duties

Typical duties for the fellow include but are not limited to: Conceiving/recommending projects/studies to advance the state of the art in the specialty area; applying forward­ thinking design and development principles to product or services development, delivery and program management, such as lean startup, user­centered design, and agile development; Analyzing and scoping the technical and policy requirements needed to implement complex digital solutions; Assessing the state of digital services provided by the Federal Government, and working to align strategies and practice; conferring with key government/private officials and top experts in the field, representing the agency at technical symposia and/or conferences; Developing authoritative papers/reports; developing and leading adoption of government­wide standards for digital services, leading to their adoption across citizen and business­facing government services; Demonstrating thought leadership and contributing best practices in a variety of technologies and principles; Contributing to a talent strategy that includes recruiting innovators and entrepreneurs to participate in solving complex and esoteric challenges.

Evaluation

We will use a method called Category Rating to assess your application.

Here’s how it will work:

You will be scored based on a review of your application materials, measuring your possession of each of the following competencies

• Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning: Ability to develop and execute an AI/ML strategy and objectives to meet or exceed desired business results.
• Innovation: Ability to apply innovative tools and technologies and to help partners make strategic & tactical decisions toward innovation.
• Leadership: Ability to effectively inspire and lead cross-functional teams to meet the project vision and shared objectives of agency partner organizations, while simultaneously providing support and guidance to all members of the partner agency.
• Communication: Communicate effectively with a variety of audiences, particularly in consulting scenarios, to establish a shared vision and understanding of a project’s technical implementation, objectives and goals.
• TTS Core Values Alignment: The ability to work with integrity, transparency and resiliency in civic minded or high impact driven environment.

If found to be eligible and at least minimally qualified for the position, your score will be used to place you in a category (Best Qualified, Well Qualified, or Qualified).

If your resume does not support your possession of the competencies listed above, we may lower your score, which could place you in a lower category.

Within each category, veterans will receive selection priority over non-veterans if supported by appropriate documentation.

Qualifications

All applications will be reviewed by a panel of subject matter experts against a scoring rubric created for this role. In order to properly be able to evaluate your previous experience, we recommend being as detailed as possible in your resume and following our general guidance on creating federal style resume.

To qualify for this role, you must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-14 in the Federal service. Specialized experience is:

1. Experience leading user experience design and research to iteratively develop digital products or services within large or complex environments. This experience must include THREE of the following:
   • Conducting user-centered research, usability or other testing with users
   • Utilizing user-centered planning tools to organize or present information to stakeholders
   • Developing customer experience quality metrics
   • Leading research or design using agile, lean or other iterative product development approaches
2. Experience navigating highly ambiguous situations to deliver results for clients. This experience must include ALL of the following:
   • Coaching clients or stakeholders through the adoption of human-centered design
   • Communicating technical information to people with varying levels of technical knowledge
   • Building and maintaining strategic relationships with stakeholders or potential partners across all levels of an organization.
   • Serving as a liaison between stakeholders or clients and project teams
3. Experience leading a team to deliver digital products or services. This experience must include THREE of the following:
   • Leading client-facing consulting projects or initiatives
   • Collaborating with cross-functional teams to achieve organizational or project objectives
   • Leading teams in user research for digital products or services
   • Providing mentorship, corrections, or feedback on user research, customer experience strategy or UX design methods to team members
   • Using agile, lean or other iterative product development methodologies

Qualification determinations cannot be made when resumes do not include the required information, so failure to provide this information may result in disqualification.

For each job on your resume, provide:

• the exact dates you held each job (from month/year to month/year or “present”)
• number of hours per week you worked (if part time)