7 minute read
Customer Experience: Taking a Human-Centered Approach
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: TAKING A
HUMAN-CENTERED APPROACH
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There’s no debating the urgency and need for government to treat constituents like valued customers. That shift in thinking has forced agencies large and small to reconsider whom they are serving, why they are serving them, and what frustrations and needs those customers carry as they interact with their government. As the following innovations prove, designing experiences with constituents in mind reduces friction and increases the success and reach of customer-facing efforts.
RECRUIT YOUR CONSTITUENTS
Los Angeles needed more than partnerships with institutions to roll out its $1.3 million AI initiative around air quality — it needed community buy-in.
Funded by NASA, the Predicting What We Breathe project uses AI, driven by satellite and ground sensor data, to analyze urban air quality.
Economic disparities in the community complicated the initiative.
People in low socioeconomic positions and Black, Asian and Hispanic residents often face higher exposure to pollution, according to the American Lung Association.
In fact, some of Los Angeles’s most impoverished communities also have the least amount of air quality sensors, said Jeanne Holm, the city’s Deputy Mayor for Budget and Innovation. The sensors are needed to gather data to help city officials understand how to improve air quality in the neighborhoods that need it most.
In April 2021, Los Angeles set up citizen science programs with local community organizations to distribute free sensors to residents, Holm said.
Working through trusted brokers such as Pacoima Beautiful, an environmental justice organization, was key to gaining the communities’ trust for setting up the devices.
“If we can convince [the brokers] this is a good thing, they use their trust to carry this forward,” Holm said.
Los Angeles also used lessons learned from the federal Census; community trust was vital for getting residents counted. The city continues to use Census ambassadors to reach residents.
DO YOUR RESEARCH
THINK BIG, START SMALL
The largest obstacle to CX is a unified understanding of the need, whether that’s granting smoother access to permits or modernizing a digital experience with a limited budget.
And the best way to get that understanding? Ask your constituents.
“The best way to do that is to do the research
with the people you’re trying to serve,” said Anne Petersen, Director of Experience Design at 18F.
In other words, organizations need to try to understand the challenge through a user- or customer-focused perspective. What are their experiences? What is their feedback?
Having a customer-centric view will help guide the best solution to an agency’s CX challenge, whether it has to do with procurement, hiring or budget.
In 2018, the U.S. Forest Service and 18F launched Open Forest, an online portal for purchasing Christmas tree permits. Through the portal, people were able to buy permits online and print them out at home so they could go to their nearest national forest and bring home their Christmas tree in record time. They no longer had to be locked into obtaining permits during weekday business hours at USFS office locations.
On top of that, with the existence of the Christmas tree portal, USFS was able to expand this purchasing system for other permits, such as its Special Use permits.
The agency worked iteratively by selecting a pilot project that could be built up and expanded for similar use cases. And, importantly, it selected a project that was representative of the people or customers it was going to serve.
USABILITY
Improving government systems depends on our ability to provide feedback on why those systems fail us, from the internal portal we use to update our time cards to the customer-facing portal of applying for a benefit, says Jenn Noinaj, a social impact strategist, researcher and designer.
“Usability heuristics can help provide the understanding and a common language for when something is hard to use or not intuitive,” Noinaj said. “Heuristics are tools to help someone learn for themselves. They can be useful as rules of thumb and great to leverage when giving feedback on a system.”
We’ve outlined a few of those heuristics below, but you can read the full list here.
1
Visibility of system status
Systems should always keep users informed about what is going on through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time. An example of this is the screen changing to “loading” after you press the submit button, giving you immediate feedback on what the system is doing.
2
Help and documentation
Agencies should provide documentation to help users understand how to complete their tasks. For example, provide the most commonly asked or searched for help topics upfront so when users encounter a common issue, they can immediately resolve it.
3User control and freedom
Examples of this are the ability to recover accidentally deleted files, undo the last action, exit a screen at any time, and see pop-ups that ask you to cancel or proceed.
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MODERN DATA SERVICES REQUIRED TO MEET MODERN CHALLENGES
So many of the challenges that agencies face around data come back to a basic question: Is the data where it needs to be?
Nick Psaki, Principal Technology Strategist for North America Public Sector at Pure Storage, said the question might be broken down further in this way: Where is the data? Where does it need to be? How do I move it there? And how do I protect it in the event of systemic issues?
These questions, which speak to the need for a robust data service infrastructure, must be addressed so that agencies can focus less on the mechanics of managing data and more on realizing its strategic value, he said.
Psaki highlighted two key areas where modern data services play a critical role.
Facilitating the Hybrid Cloud
One of the biggest challenges agencies face now is bridging their on-premises and public cloud environments.
By some industry estimates, the federal government has increased its investment in cloud services by 33% between 2020 and 2021, Psaki said. The challenge now is to ensure that data services work seamlessly across those environments. What's needed is a consistent, predictable and accessible methodology for moving the data to where it needs to be.
It's about "making data better, faster and more available, and then making it available in multiple milieus," he said.
Meeting the Ransomware Threat
A second pressing challenge is the growing threat of ransomware and the need to recover data quickly.
When it comes to backing up and archiving data, organizations typically have focused on backup efficiency, minimizing the impact on bandwidth and storage capacity at the expense of speed. Unfortunately, this approach makes large-scale recovery incredibly time-consuming, and when an agency has lost data that is essential to their operations and services, time is of the essence.
A modern recovery solution changes those dynamics by building on recent advances in technology and new approaches to data service infrastructure, Psaki said.
For example, having extremely high bandwidth, a modern recovery solution can be designed with a high degree of parallelism, making it possible to restore data to multiple points at the same time.
Also, by setting up an intermediate platform between primary data services and the backup and recovery infrastructure, you gain the ability to recover a couple of months of data at once. Pure Storage FlashArray and FlashBlade deliver the kinds of performance that older technology can't touch.
"Today, with modern data service infrastructure and storage arrays, data recovery becomes a cornerstone of data protection and continuity of
operations efforts," Psaki said.
Often, agencies already have modern platforms in place but don’t realize all the capabilities that are available. But that is changing. In the past 18 months, Psaki has seen growing interest from agencies looking to take advantage of those capabilities – and looking to Pure Storage to serve as their partner.
"We're here to help you get the most out of what you purchase in order to be as effective and efficient as you can be in your organization's mission," he said.
