Making Connections That Matter with Better Public-Sector Customer Experience RESEARCH BRIEF
Introduction Imagine the experience you might have through one of today’s top-tier privatesector companies as a customer. Whether it’s returning a package to Amazon, hailing a ride on Lyft or looking for guidance on a Zappos purchase, you, the customer, expect the interaction to be fast, seamless and effective. Today, that expectation has transferred from customers of private-sector companies to those interacting with government agencies at all levels. Whether engaging in person, on the phone, through applications or online, people expect the same quality of experience with the public sector as they get with private. These expectations are valuable internally for the government, too; federal, state and local governments, and educational institutions benefit from communication and transparency. But achieving that level of customer experience is not as simple as flipping a switch. Government deals with a variety of challenges that the private sector has long since resolved in its journey to great customer experiences. Funding, workforce, technology, data silos and a true understanding of return on investment are all hurdles.
Given all of this, governments have made great strides in the past few years to improve the customer experience (CX), in part because of a growing realization of its importance and because of federal mandates such as President Obama’s 2011 customer service executive order. In GovLoop’s recent survey of 176 public-sector employees, results showed that although they still face significant obstacles, governments have gotten better at understanding the value of good customer experiences, and are working hard to clear the remaining hurdles out of their way. In conducting this survey, which aimed to understand if CX is an increasing priority for government, GovLoop partnered with Avtex, a full-service CX consultancy focused on helping organizations build trust with their customers. In the following pages, we dissect the results, give context and understanding to their challenges, give advice on the way forward with government CX, and gain insights from John Seeds, Senior Marketing Director at Avtex.
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Government Customer Experience: Improving, But Help Still Needed The good news from GovLoop’s survey? Overall, the public sector is realizing the importance and benefits of good CX, both internally and externally, and is taking steps to improve it. But to do that, it’s important to first understand what CX means and how its ramifications flow through government. “In our view, customer experience is the sum of all interactions as it relates to citizens’ experience with trying to accomplish a certain set of activities in terms of a need or want for information or for getting something done,” said Seeds. “But historically for citizens, that has been very difficult because there’s just a magnitude of government agencies and the complexities associated with what citizens really need.” Seeds points out that the government is quite different from the private sector, where a company exists to deliver a specific set of goods or services. The government, on the other hand, provides a broad range of activities, making getting the information a citizen needs like finding a needle in a haystack.
Additionally, the majority of respondents said that their organization’s CX efforts and departmental communications regarding CX were at least average, if not above average or even excellent – a far cry from internal perceptions around government CX in years past (Figures 2 and 3). FIGURE 2
How would you rate your organization’s CX on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 meaning very poor, 5 meaning excellent)? 1 (16%)
2 (19%)
3 (37%)
4 (18%)
5 (10%)
FIGURE 3
On a scale of 1-5, how well do the departments in your organization communicate with each other regarding CX (1 being badly, 5 being excellent)?
Historically, government’s CX ratings have been dismal, in part because of this differentiator. In fact, a recent Forrester report about customer experience noted that, as a whole, federal agencies tied for last in average customer service scores alongside internet service providers.
1 (10%)
But there is positive news from GovLoop’s survey that indicates the landscape may soon be changing. In fact, a large majority of survey respondents (76 percent) said that CX is a strategic priority for their organizations in the coming fiscal year (Figure 1).
And finally, on the side of positive news and improvements, a strong majority of survey respondents said that they were in fact able to effectively communicate with and gather information from their citizens (Figure 4).
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 4
Is CX a strategic priority for your organization in the coming fiscal year?
NO 24%
YES 76%
2 (15%)
Are you able to effectively communicate with and gather information from your citizens?
3 (36%)
4 (24%)
HAVEN’T CONSIDERED IT/NOT AN EFFORT OF MY DEPT. 10%
5 (15%)
YES, DEFINITELY 20%
NO 13%
“Government still needs to make a big leap and understand the focus needs to be on the citizen journey, not the services or agency journey.” John Seeds, Senior Marketing Director at Avtex
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YES, BUT IT COULD BE BETTER 57%
The Growing Realization of the Importance of CX What is causing the perception of improvement in government’s CX abilities and efforts? It could simply be a sign of the times and a real acknowledgement of the importance of CX that just was not there in previous years. “As we all know, while private-sector customer experience has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade, government CX had stagnated, and this was really just because they did not have to improve,” Seeds said. “There was no competitor to drive enhancements or even an acknowledgment that CX was something they needed to look at, because where else was a citizen going to go?” Today though, the fact that government employees acknowledge the importance of CX and feel it’s improving indicates a positive change – even if it isn’t measured in leaps and bounds. “It’s very positive that there’s at least acknowledgement within the government space that CX efforts need to be addressed,” Seeds said. “These survey results show that this is really a big thing, because even any acknowledgement that there’s an issue in CX and an impression that it is improving is something that’s at least level-setting.”
Additionally, other efforts have laid a growing groundwork for the importance of CX in government in the past decade, as Rick Parrish of Forrester Research explained in a blog post for GovLoop: The cornerstones of this foundation are the new capabilities embodied in 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, the ambitious goals enshrined in the Customer Service Cross-Agency Priority Goal, and the solid CX improvement guidance offered by the Digital Services Playbook. These high-profile improvements join a growing host of other exemplars, including accomplished hubs of CX innovation like the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technology and the Office of Personnel Management’s Innovation Lab, as well as recent and planned CX improvement projects in the Social Security Administration, U.S. Postal Service, and Internal Revenue Service. I could go on. Thanks to burgeoning initiatives like these, government CX has finally reached a tipping point. A slow but inexorable CX revolution is beginning that will, with the patient application of best practices, yield great improvements to the ease, effectiveness and even the emotional quality of government CX.
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The Continuing Challenges to Good CX The news is not all rosy, however. The truth is a vast ocean still sits between prioritizing CX and actually taking the steps to do that and having customers recognize the change, the survey shows. Challenges involve funding and disparate systems, for example. In terms of funding, 48 percent said neither long- nor short-term efforts to improve CX in their organization were funded, and 24 percent said that long-term efforts were not sufficiently funded, but short-term ones were (Figure 5).
FIGURE 5
Are your efforts to improve CX funded within your organization?
28%
24%
48%
NEAR & LONG TERM FUNDING PLAN IS IN PLACE AND SUFFICIENT
LONG TERM FUNDING IS NOT OR INSUFFICIENTLY FUNDED, BUT SHORT TERM IS FUNDED
NEITHER LONG OR SHORT TERM IS SUFFICIENTLY FUNDED
Additionally, the fact that data needed to improve CX resides in a variety of systems proved a challenge for survey respondents. Twenty-three percent said their data is in one location as a system of record, while almost as many—22 percent—said that data was spread across as many as six locations (Figure 6). As one survey respondent noted, “Getting all the other departments to communicate, understand what ‘enterprise customer service experience’ means and share information, is very hard.” Another commented, “Completing the process with full cooperation within all agencies to use one system is difficult.”
FIGURE 6
How many systems must be accessed in order for agents to view complete user data during an interaction?
6+ SYSTEMS 22%
4-5 SYSTEMS 18%
1 LOCATION/SYSTEM OF RECORD 23%
2-3 SYSTEMS 37%
The challenge of funding CX improvements in government is not news – budget has long been one of the challenges across all areas of government, which are often tasked with doing more with less. One thing that stands out as one of the largest obstacles to CX improvements is disparate systems, however. Siloed data and departments, and the lack of a single system of record imperil government efforts to truly provide a seamless experience for citizens – yet ease-of-use and seamless interaction are touchpoints of stellar CX.
“Historically, government has built silos of information that live and exist on their own,” Seeds said. “So being able to deliver a single pane of glass that is centric to the citizen as opposed to centric to the service is the true paradigm shift that government really needs to acknowledge and make the jump to.” This way of thinking in government has been a real blocker to improving CX, he added. “In the past, government has thought of services as siloed and separate, but citizens don’t think that way,” he said. “They are just trying to get to one desired outcome. They don’t care about the backend or the systems that are necessary to the resolution of their concern. So today it is imperative that government has the perspective of being able to deliver on the necessary information in a seamless way from one system.” That can minimize the number of handoffs that government workers must do to get customers’ answers. “Government still needs to make a big leap and understand the focus needs to be on the citizen journey, not the services or agency journey,” Seeds added. In fact, this challenge is less about the particular technology and more about a particular mind-set, he said: “It’s not about one tool for all data. The data itself needs to be the foundation of your approach, and the way you access it needs to be integrated across the agency so anybody can access it so the end-user experience is more seamless.” In addition to budget and disparate systems, government still and likely always will face other unique challenges that can be obstacles to creating a better CX for citizens, Seeds said. One challenge is how agencies have historically operated. In most cases, agencies within departments were not designed to necessarily share information or even interact regularly with one another. “Agencies have a set of departments, or channels, that often act like their own organizations,” Seeds explained. “What causes them then to struggle with this then is understanding that customer experience really is about delivering that seamless set of interactions regardless of the channels. This then hampers and constrains agencies from really delivering that seamless experience.” Compliance and the variety of mandates that agencies must meet is another obstacle. Government must abide by particular legislation when making changes, and there are mandates that may prevent CX efforts from getting into place quickly, as well as other critical requirements like moving to cloud. “There are a lot of moving parts that have to be considered,” Seeds said. “It creates a little bit of paralysis for some of these agencies when figuring out where to take those steps and allocate resources for CX.”
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The Way Forward for Government CX Despite these historical and unique challenges, government is not giving up the fight for improved CX, according to the GovLoop survey. When asked if their agency was taking actionable steps right now to improve their CX, 64 percent responded yes (Figure 7). And their top priorities are spread across a host of areas important to CX: Moving to cloud-based technology and hosted data and moving data to one location were tied at 19 percent, with using big data analytics right behind at 18 percent (Figure 8). FIGURE 7
Is your agency taking actionable steps right now to improve CX?
FIGURE 8
If yes, what is your top priority/ first step you are planning for CX improvements? FIGURE 9
Have these steps or tactics measurably improved your CX & provided a ROI?
NO 36%
19%
MOVING DATA TO ONE LOCATION
NO 41%
YES 64%
19%
MOVING TO CLOUD BASED TECHNOLOGY & HOSTED DATA
18% USING BIG DATA ANALYTICS
YES 59%
And the best news of all? These steps and priorities they are moving forward on are working. In fact, 59 percent of respondents said that these efforts were measurably improving their CX and had provided a strong ROI (Figure 9). But while technology solutions can be helpful in improving CX and providing ROI, Seeds said the most important thing agencies can do to improve their efforts is to develop a sense of empathy for what a citizen goes through in their interactions with the agency’s platforms. A process for doing this is “journey mapping.” (See sidebar.) “You need to go through the process of mapping out the citizen journey, and put yourselves in the shoes of a customer going through the process, and make sure the experience is actually being delivered in the way that it’s intended,” he said.
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The Importance of Journey Mapping As citizens and technology evolve, so too must the strategies to provide effective CX. Journey mapping is one effective tactic. Formerly considered a minor process, journey mapping has blossomed into the focus of many organizations looking to better understand their customers. Here’s what you need to know about it and how it can affect your employees and the citizens who interact with them: • Journey mapping is an exercise intended to offer organizations a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience from initial contact through the end of the relationship. • By identifying and studying each point of interaction between the business and customer, your organization is better able to identify the experience you want to provide to your customer, and the experience your customer would like to receive. • Journey mapping also offers significant insight into the motivation, thoughts and expectations of the customer. By understanding the customer in context, an organization is better able to tailor communications and CX to the personality of its target audience. • An effectively conducted journey mapping exercise will offer data needed to plan all CX initiatives with the customer’s perspective always in mind.
To learn more about creating a customer journey map, check out GovLoop’s Customer Service Playbook for Government.
Voices from the Field We asked our 176 public-sector survey respondents the following questions: • What is the biggest challenge for your department as it relates to creating better CX? • How are you measuring improvement in CX? Here are some of their responses. BIGGEST CHALLENGES:
MEASURING IMPROVEMENTS:
“Our biggest challenge is that all customers must go through one person before they can get help. That one person is the worstqualified person to deal with customers (no people skills). The customer is so frustrated by the time he can talk to somebody else, that it is too late.”
“All of our CX apps are web-based. We are using web analytics to gauge usage. However, analytics do not give us a measure of happiness or delight. We know our citizens use our app –we don’t know if they like them.”
“Coherence among platforms and practice areas is a huge challenge.” “Completing the process with full cooperation within all agencies to use one system is difficult.” “A challenge is developing a culture that prioritizes the voice of the customer and enables staff to use the appropriate tools to engage and develop new processes, services and systems that are responsive to customer needs.” “Different divisions have different targets and different ways to capture data.” “Getting all the other departments to communicate, understand what ‘enterprise customer service experience’ means and share information, is very hard.”
“To measure improvements, we do annual customer loyalty surveys to measure satisfaction, best interest, Net Promoter Score, and loyalty. We’re working on building transactional surveys at key touchpoints and hosting user design sessions asking our customers to help us to build solutions around business goals and government mission needs.” “Currently there is no measurement of CX improvement in our agency.” “Every email from every employee has a computer link below the signature line that allows the reader to access a CX survey.” “We are not yet at the level of maturity of measuring improvements. We’re just doing annual surveys for now, but there are better ways out there.”
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Taking a 360° Approach to Customer Experience Customer experiences are the result of a complex ecosystem of tools, processes and strategies. Effectively coordinating these components requires a cohesive approach, particularly in today’s government agency, where departments are dealing with reduced budgets, legacy technology and other hurdles. Avtex uses a strategic methodology designed to help fuel exceptional experiences. From initial strategic planning through management of technology, their end-to-end approach ensures support for every area of government CX efforts and every step in the customer journey.
STRATEGY
Avtex offers comprehensive CX consulting services, including customer journey mapping, technology review and process planning to help you create a strategy for successful interactions.
IMPLEMENTATION
MANAGEMENT
Avtex offers full-service application, license, hosting and platform management services to keep your ecosystem performing at optimal levels.
From planning to crossplatform integrations, Avtex guides your business through the implementation process to optimize your CX ecosystem for today and into the future.
INNOVATION
Through creative utilization of your current technology, exploration of new platforms or development of a custom application, Avtex helps you keep pace with ever-evolving customer expectations.
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Conclusion The history of CX in government is long and fraught, and the perception of interactions between citizens and agencies is not often positive. Budgetary challenges, legacy technology and outdated mind-sets about how interactions with citizens should go have been holding back the potential of exceptional CX in the public sector. With new understandings about the payoffs excellent CX can have both externally and internally, government employees, leaders and agencies are starting to make the necessary shifts in attitude, data collection and communication efforts to start to bring their CX efforts up to par with what today’s citizenry demands. It’s not easy, but it’s happening. And with the right technology and a valued privatesector partner that has experience in the full spectrum of the CX journey, positive change in public-sector CX can take root. This improved government CX will require reliability and speed across all channels. In the challenging world of government, agencies and individuals will succeed by understanding that they must make the citizen’s journey as simple and straightforward as possible.
About Avtex
About GovLoop
Avtex is a full-service Customer Experience consultancy focused on helping organizations build trust with their customers. Our breadth of knowledge uniquely positions us to assist in the identification, deployment and optimization of technology platforms that support the customer journey. As a peer-recognized consulting firm, we guide organizations through the process of identifying, implementing, and maintaining key strategies and technologies to drive effective Customer Experience.
GovLoop’s mission is to inspire public sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 250,000 members, fostering crossgovernment collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to the public sector.
Learn more at: www.avtex.com.
For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com. govloop.com | @govloop
Making Connections That Matter with Better Public-Sector Customer Experience 9
1152 15th St. NW Suite 800 Washington, DC 20005 P: (202) 407-7421 | F: (202) 407-7501 www.govloop.com @GovLoop