Reduced manning makes self-service mindset essential Published April 27, 2009 By Col. Jennifer Graham 71st Mission Support Group commander VANCE AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- About two years ago the Air Force made a strategic decision, the impact of which is increasingly being felt by each one of us. The decision was to cash in 40,000 manpower authorizations and redirect the savings into recapitalizing our aging aircraft fleet. Seventy percent of those authorizations came from support career fields. Each impacted functional area -- personnel, finance, communications, logistics, etc. -- had to develop alternative ways to deliver support services that did not require a customer service provider at base level. The overarching business model, called Force Support Transformation, follows a United Services Automobile Association model combing regionalized and centralized reach-back call centers with information technology self-service applications. While this transformation has been rolled out piece by piece over the last year and a half, we are now starting to feel the impact of lost manpower in our Vance customer-service areas. As customer-service providers, our local capabilities have diminished and that's frustrating. As a customer, your access to service has changed and that's frustrating. The 71st Mission Support Group's self-service campaign is a concentrated effort to educate our customer base on how and where to go for service while at the same time leveraging our now scarce service providers in the most economical ways. For example, every time a customer walks into a customer-service center or calls the local support office on the phone when they could have self-serviced via the Web or a 1-800 call, local providers are being pulled away from local workload requirements. Educating our customer base on how to use information-technology solutions and when to call the 1-800 call centers is how we want to reduce frustration for both the customer and the local provider. Changing the customer mindset to think first of self-service before walking into a local service center is our goal. We realize this won't be easy. As we all know, the information-technology solutions are not always user friendly or easily found. Some in our customer base have grown up in the Air Force where face to face service was the only method of delivery. It will take time and open communication to make this shift. I'm confident if we remain true to our agile, flexible Airman culture we will turn this strategic decision into a well-tuned solution.