Have you ever waited in queue to have a driver’s license renewed and felt your frustration levels rising at the apparent lack of urgency, compassion, and accountability? What can you do? You must have a driver’s license, but it is not like you can go somewhere else. Frustrating experiences like these contribute to a growing sense that government is disconnected and no longer “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Confidence in our system of government has been precipitously declining for the past two decades. Today, approximately 80% of Americans say they do not trust government and 92% say government is unresponsive to the needs of “ordinary” Americans. These are the findings of a recent Pew Research study which surveyed more than 5,000 U.S. adults in spring 2022. Why are these findings a wakeup call and what, if anything, must be done to urgently reverse this alarming trend?
A quick civics review reminds us that the purpose of government is to establish social order which allows individuals to equitably pursue self-interests. This order is achieved by creating and enforcing laws and by managing affairs such as defense, foreign relations, commerce, and other essential public services. These duties are often coordinated between local, regional, and national government agencies.
Consider for a moment the occasions when many people are required to engage with government agencies. Often, these are times of extreme duress like those following the death of a loved one, losing employment or surviving a natural disaster. On these occasions, relief is urgently needed. Government agencies are often the sole provider of this relief. In other cases, public resources are required to sustain a livelihood or to demonstrate regulatory compliance. If the government is unresponsive during any of these moments, then distrust may follow.
The citizen CX mandate
In 2020, the Biden-Harris administration proposed a plan to reverse this trend. The administration, in its President’s Management Agenda (PMA), proposed a roadmap to rebuild trust in government by delivering excellent, equitable, and secure federal services and citizen customer experience. This initiative expressly states the objective as to:
“…improve the experience of those Government serves—all of the people, families, businesses, organizations, and communities across America, especially those communities that have been historically underserved by Government—when they use Government services. This focus on customer experience will not only improve the delivery, efficiency, security, and effectiveness of our Government programs, it will advance equity and enhance everyday interactions with public services and uplift the lives of those who need it the most.”
With this agenda, the administration then issued Executive Order 14058 which identified high impact service providers (HISPs) and instructed them to take as many as 36 specific actions to improve the delivery of service, and associated experience, to their citizen constituents. These HISPs are the 17 executive branch agencies which include Departments of: Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Interior, General Services Administration, Personal Management, Small Business Administration, Social Security, Health and Human Services, Treasury, and Agency for International Development.
Executive Order 14058 is complimented by the preceding 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act of 2018 (21st Century IDEA) and subsequent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-11, Section 280. Together, these form a CX delivery framework for not only rebuilding trust in national government, but they also provide a model for state and local governments to follow in their pursuit to bolster trust in agencies closer to home.
A closer look
The President's Management Agenda #2 rests on three core strategies. They are:
1. Improve the service design, digital products, and customer-experience management of federal high impact service providers by reducing customer burden, addressing inequities, and streamlining processes.
The strategies for how to design digital products are more fully outlined in the 21st century IDEA act. This act is prefaced by stating “Government exists to serve citizens, and this bill ensures government leverages available technology to provide cohesive, user-friendly online service that people around this country expect and deserve.” The act requires executive branch agencies to
- Modernize websites (using latest standards)
- Digitize services and forms
- Accelerate the use of e-signatures
- Improve citizen customer experience
- Standardize and transition to centralized, shared services
The IDEA act defines much of the “how;” however, to get a better sense of the “why,” we need to look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure HISP success.
Results are measured and reported under two high-level measures. These top-line goals are in turn supported by a handful of secondary measures.
The top-line measures are Satisfaction and Confidence & Trust.
Satisfaction is determined by measures of Quality, Ease & Simplicity, and Efficiency and Speed.
Confidence and Trust is determined by Equity and Transparency, and Employee helpfulness.
Implicit in these KPI measures is the imperative to design journeys and interactions that deliver satisfaction (using tactics that promote ease, low-effort, and efficacy), and trust (using tactics that empower employees to serve with equity, transparency, and speed).
2. Design, build, and manage government service delivery for key life experiences that cut across federal agencies.
The OMB circular A-11 defines the following categories of key life experiences: approaching retirement, facing financial shock, recovering from a disaster, low-income, child welfare, transitioning from military service to civilian life, and special needs individuals transitioning to adulthood.
Furthermore, the following interaction types have also been identified: Administrative (e.g., application and renewals for passports, and other forms of ID). Benefits (e.g., application and eligibility for entitlements). Compliance (e.g., filing taxes or other documentation showing conformity). Recreation (e.g., utilization of public spaces). Informational (e.g., facilitating requests for information or disclosures). Data and Research (e.g., research activities, sharing of findings). And finally, Regulatory (e.g., providing guidance supporting commerce and all related activities).
These directives are important because they serve to place focus on the individuals being served, the reasons why they are seeking service and their expectations. Understanding this is essential to build the right journeys and interactions.
3. Identify and prioritize the development of federal shared products, services, and standards that enable simple, seamless, and secure customer experiences across high impact service providers
The final directive seeks to make the citizen customer experience seamless and consistent across all federal executive agencies.
For CX practitioners, these strategies could be restated as:
- Know who your constituents are and what they seek and value most—and only then design the journey, interactions, and objective-based measures.
- Use digital transformation principles to modernize outdated processes and systems so that you can improve access and reduce the effort needed by constituents to achieve their objectives.
- Design and build in ways that eliminate silos and promote a purposely consistent and satisfying experience across all journeys and across all government agencies.
Moving from mandate to action
Fortunately, many government service providers already have the foundational building blocks in place because they already have a contact center infrastructure. The contact center is fundamentally designed to manage constituent interactions. It makes sense then that the contact center could serve as the foundation or hub from which to expand in ways needed to support new digital services, design and deliver better customer journeys, and more accurately measure customer satisfaction – moving beyond a contact center to a complete citizen customer experience interactions center.
Here is a brief checklist of top factors to consider.
Open service architecture. The third of three strategies defined for delivering excellent, equitable, and secure federal services and customer experience is to Identify and prioritize the development of Federal shared products, services, and standards that enable simple, seamless, and secure customer experiences across High Impact Service Providers. Furthermore, the digital transformation required to satisfy elements of the 21st Century IDEA objectives requires an open CX platform.
As a hub of interaction activity, a contact center must have an open design to integrate with all the ancillary systems needed to deliver digital products and services, to create the convenient access constituents require, and to empower employees to deliver the most efficacious and efficient assistance possible. As a rule, cloud contact centers are more open and enable more of these capabilities.
Digital ready. OMB A-11 Section 280.7 requires “to the greatest extent practicable” that all services are made available through a digital channel using customer experience industry leading practices. These include digital service channels such as mobile, responsive websites, and public access kiosks along with traditional services channels (e.g., in-person, telephone, and postal mail).
To appreciate the importance of this directive, it is helpful to examine historical engagement. A quick analysis of HISP interactions from Oct. 1, 2022, to Dec. 21, 2022, shows that 46% of contacts used the phone, 36% used email and 18% used web and mobile methods. In other words, while voice is still the most popular, it is no longer the most dominant. Now, 54% use “digital” channels when requesting help. Furthermore, this trend is expected to continue as more younger constituents prefer digital-first mobile devices and the abundance of rich self-service options exclusively available to digital users. Therefore, your contact center must be digital ready by being able to support not only digital access channels, but also tools to build digitally accessible self-service interactions like searchable knowledge bases, bots, and automated guides.
Customer analytics. The 21st century IDEA act and OMB A-11 Sections 280.10 and 280.14 require agencies to collect data on user behavior and satisfaction and to use this data in the prioritization and design of digital services.
Customers reveal a great deal from what they say and do. We can understand customer satisfaction (CSAT) by what constituents tell us in surveys. But to really understand what frustrates them, we need to observe what they do and how they react. Therefore, your contact center should allow you to learn as much as you can about your customers and their experiences not only by soliciting survey feedback, but also from deeply analyzing and understanding the details of their interactions.
Workforce empowerment. OMB A-11 Sections 280 requires HISPs to measure and report customer feedback. Measurements reflecting top-level satisfaction and trust are determined by secondary measurements of customer effort, interaction efficacy, speed, equity, and employee helpfulness. These measures are heavily dependent on empowered agency employees.
Regardless of digital enablement, human-to-human interactions still require professionally trained, resourced, and managed employees. This begins with providing a complete context for people they interact with. This may include a history of prior interactions and transactions, ability to determine status of in-process services, and access to information needed to satisfy anticipated questions. Behind the scenes, this may also include training and quality control as well as process automation to speed task completion, accuracy, and consistency.
Journey orchestration. OMB A-11 Sections 280.4 mandates a “human centered design.” This means that organizations optimize service delivery by designing for the end-to-end journey of the service. When practicing service design, organizations holistically review not only the customer's experience, but also the systems and processes that contribute to the experiences of both employees and customers.
Journey orchestration is a new class of tools which are needed to pull all the underlying capabilities together to create the right interactions and overall journey experience. For example, using orchestration tools, you can design a specific self-service experience for a mobile user that includes a path to elevate that interaction to a specialist as needed.
Summary
Government agencies are indeed interested in citizen customer experience. It is the essential ingredient that helps restore confidence and trust between government agencies and the constituents they service. Leaving a constituent with a positive experience is evidence that governments are responsive to the needs of the people they serve and can be trusted to help in moments of need.
Executive Order 14058 and supporting directives serve as an excellent template for not only the federal government, but also for many state and local government agencies in the effort to rebuild trust through delivering better service and better experiences. (And with typical bureaucratic specificity, this framework can also be instrumental to private sector organizations looking for precise and reasoned tactics for improving their customer experiences.)
Agencies may have many of the building blocks they need to improve the experiences they deliver to their constituents. The contact center represents existing infrastructure that can be extended to implement the recommendations modeled in Executive Order 14058, the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act of 2018, and OMB Circular A-11, Section 280. By expanding your contact center into an interactions center, you can re-tool many of your existing investments to deliver better experiences for constituents regardless of journey interaction.