Part of the meaning of “family-centered services” is providing good customer service. It means developing the habit of seeing yourself and your office through the eyes of the parents who interact with you, and reorganizing your work to become more responsive. Customer service is right in the center of the bubble chart—part of our core business.
What do you want from the child support program as a custodial mom, as a custodial dad, as a grandmother? First of all, you want results. You want the other parent to pay. You don’t want to waste your time. You don’t want to sit in a waiting room or in a phone queue. You don’t want to fill out paperwork over and over again. You want to get your questions answered. You want a clear understanding of what will happen to you in the process. You want to feel safe. You might want to apply for other programs, such as SNAP and SSI, if only someone would ask you. You don’t want to be judged. You want your worker to know what you are up against.
And if you are a noncustodial dad or mom? You want the worker to understand the complexity and sorrow of your life. You want to be treated as a parent, not a wallet. You want to be respected and understood. You want the system to work with you, not against you. You don’t want to be judged. You don’t want to be humiliated. You want a chance to make things right. You need a job. You want to see your kids. You want for your children what you might never have had.
Every one of us has had good and bad customer experiences. And we can identify precisely what went right or wrong in those experiences. Usually, when things go right, we feel that we matter, we feel heard, we are engaged in the process, and we can maintain some control over the outcome—whether we are ordering online, fixing a problem with a bill, or sitting in a hospital waiting room.
The child support program has a deep culture of innovation. Innovation starts with every worker and every manager saying out loud:
Do you know what I saw? What I heard? What I read?
What if we …?
Why do we…?
We ought to try….
As child support offices around the country know, technology is part of the answer to providing good quality customer service, especially in a time of budget cutbacks. Technology can help us reach a new generation of parents, many of whom get their information through the internet. We can expand customer-friendly, interactive websites and voice response systems. We can use cell phone texts and email alerts to parents. We can post short videos with real customers to speak for our program and develop apps that make our internet services easy to use. We can encourage parents to apply for services online and link parents to such resources as benefit calculators and program navigators.
But technology is not the whole answer. When states were implementing statewide computer systems in the 1990s, the prevailing idea was that we would become efficient collection agencies—highly automated, impersonal, with minimal caseworker intervention. Now we know that that approach is not enough. We need to build in the missing ingredient in our program—parental engagement. The money is important. But what we know now is that child support is about more than just money; it’s about families.
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The many systems that connect caseworkers around the country have become very important to the child support program. Child support professionals are able to help families get child support payments more quickly, and families are then better able to help their children thrive.
The child support program is one of the few government programs that systematically reach men, and the only one to do so in their roles as fathers. Because the program serves so many children—a quarter of all children and half of all poor children—and both their parents throughout childhood, it is uniquely positioned to connect men to a range of resources to help them be the fathers they want to be. 
The OCSE “bubble chart” promotes the child support program’s vision for a more holistic family-centered approach to service delivery. Our collaborations with other public agencies and community organizations in the six domains of the bubble chart are enhancing the success of our program’s fundamental mission to reinforce the responsibility of parents to support their children when they live apart and to encourage fathers and mothers to be involved in their children’s lives. 
Roughly 10 percent of the phone calls that ring in our OCSE customer service office are from grandparents seeking information about child support services; some have custody of their grandchildren. From conversations with these callers, we know that most grandparents who are thrust into custodianship of their grandchildren depend on access to public financial resources. Many, who may have accumulated some financial assets from years of working, are now living on fixed incomes. The OCSE staff helps to answer the grandparents’ questions about child support services, and often refers grandparent callers to other services, including SNAP (food stamps) and Access and Visitation services.
April is National Minority Health Month. The front-page article in the 
As the front-page article stresses, partnerships are key to this holistic approach. OCSE continues to seek collaborative opportunities with federal and state agencies as well as community organizations that also serve our customers. For the “bubble chart” (left) to be successful, we’ll need to continue to create and strengthen relationships with other programs that serve the families who come into the child support program, such as Medicaid, CHIP, Head Start, SNAP (food stamps), WIC, and SSI. 
Creative Specialist isn’t a job title that most public employees seek out. Nor do government job applications traditionally ask, “How would you improve outreach to clients so that they can understand and use our services more easily?” Yet in the past few years, your state, tribal and local child support agencies and OCSE regional offices have been creatively reaching out in ways that can have lasting, positive effects on the way we connect with our customers.
Data and research are engines that drive the national child support program. Data help us know whether we are on track to meet our performance goals. They help us identify the best case strategies to pursue. Research and data help us gain public support for our program and develop policies and initiatives that can effectively respond to trends in our caseload.
Each New Year brings us new opportunities to enhance our services to children, parents and families. I am especially looking forward to the opportunity to help families through collaboration with the Assets for Independence program (featured on page 1 in the 
The OCSE passport denial program collects tens of millions of dollars for children every year. We work closely with state child support programs and the Department of State (DOS) to ensure that passports are denied when appropriate and “holds” are released quickly upon payment. Did you know that DOS paralegals (in its Bureau of Counselor Affairs) work with embassies to help parents who are stranded overseas? And OCSE staff members work closely with the DOS “special issuance passport” members who handle all diplomatic and military passports, which take longer to process than others.