The Blast Newsletter: Continuous Improvement Community of Practice

Office of the Governor / Office of Financial Management sent this bulletin at 11/04/2025 08:20 AM PST

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Issue No. 33 | October 2025

Our first annual CX Conference is officially in the books!

Jesse Jones, Tamieca Hamlin and Kelly Brunson during our keynote presentation at our Customer Experience Conference.

We had such a wonderful time with you all during our first annual Customer Experience Conference last week!

Jesse Jones, Your Washington Director, and Tamieca Hamlin, former Deputy Chief Customer Experience Officer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, kicked off the conference with an inspiring keynote, and we had 11 wonderful sessions from various presenters (some that you know and love!) with presentations centered around ideas, strategies, and inspiration to improve the customer experience within government. We had such a great turnout, and we thank you all for attending! We hope you learned some practical tools and/or strategies to enhance your own agency's customer experience culture as well as actionable insights that will help shape the future of public service.

If you missed it, don't worry! All of our sessions were recorded, and we have all materials on our Conference Materials page if you'd like to take a look and dive in.

Again, we're very excited for this endeavor and all that it brings, and to continue working with you all to advance customer experience in our state!

What you missed

At our October meeting, Darleen Simkins with the Parks and Recreation Commission shared how her agency improved their customer's experience with state parks using customer journey mapping, a visual tool to help understand a customer’s experience before, during and after buying a product or utilizing a service. See more below!

Did you attend our session? Let us know what you thought by taking our feedback survey!

Reflection series

Check out our Reflection Series interview featuring Todd Steben with the Washington State Lottery. Todd shared exciting information about a strategic initiative to enhance the organization's financial efficiency through optimizing the cash management process.

Questions?

For questions on anything related to the community of practice, contact:

Talia Mazzara, Senior Performance Advisor

Theresa Dew, Senior Performance Advisor

Improving the customer journey at Washington State Parks

A customer journey map the Parks and Recreation Commission used to outline how their customers experience state parks

We are so grateful to Darleen Simkins with the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission for sharing how her agency used customer journey mapping and continuous feedback to improve how their customers experience state parks across the state.

During part one of her two-part presentation, Darleen shared how State Parks is grounded in stewardship and lands management, and how they work hard to make all park visitors feel welcome during their visit. They utilize customer surveys (and receive more than 35,000 responses annually!) for direct feedback as well as transactional data and marketing analytics to understand the number of visitors and gauge their reach across the state. By combining data with understanding their customers' overall journey, from planning a visit to reflecting on wonderful memories made during their trip, they're able to understand which improvements to make to enhance that experience for everyone.

Darleen will join us for part two in 2026 and will dive into how to actually create customer journey maps for your customers.

Visit our session archives for materials and to watch the presentation!

Don't forget to register for our 2026 meeting series!

As a reminder, our community will be meeting every other month beginning January 2026, and registration will be required to attend our series. While we're still hard at work on developing our schedule, take a moment and register now for our 2026 series to save the dates!

You will be registered for all meetings in the series but can choose to attend the session(s) that work best with your schedule. We're looking forward to continuing our learning journey with you!

Coming up next

An assortment of pumpkins in all shapes, colors and sizes

November 18, 2025
10:30am - 12:00pm
Zoom Meeting Link

Presenters: Derek Puckett, Washington Technology Solutions
&
Talia Mazzara and Theresa Dew, Your Washington