Customer experience is not just at the top of many brands’ priorities. Government agencies are undergoing a customer experience transformation, led by a 2021 Biden administration executive order directing federal agencies to improve service delivery.
The remit is to modernize government programs and provide a seamless, secure customer experience. It offers strategies brands can also follow, including why CX must be led from the top.
“CX initiatives are most successful when leadership creates a mandate as it shows its importance and helps align priorities, whether it’s government or brands,” said Eric Karofsky, CEO of VectorHX, who is leading the CX component for a large government initiative.
Government departments are complex environments in which it can be challenging to implement CX initiatives. The same can be said for some large enterprise-size organizations. They often have a range of department leaders and typically require an executive or C-level sponsor to lead and oversee CX programs.
The executive order underscores another key element of success: There needs to be a governance structure based around a CX vision that’s tied tightly to the organizational mission.
“It helps track metrics, address team structure, manage roles and responsibilities as well as the associated tools and technology,” Karofsky said.
For the government, the overarching goal is to rebuild public trust by ensuring government services are efficient, equitable and responsive to the needs of all citizens.
There’s room for improvement, with trust in government 12 percentage points lower than the global cross-industry average, according to a 2023 Qualtrics survey of nearly 8,000 consumers.
So far, Veterans Affairs has significantly increased its trust scores, demonstrating that trust measures need to be a strategic part of CX, according to Karofsky.
While brands typically use metrics like net promoter score and customer satisfaction score, they’re not the only choice for measuring trust signals. Karofsky said it’s better to select and benchmark trust metrics that align with brand goals.
“There are different trust equations and frameworks, and organizations should consider multiple trust equations, select the ones that best fit their brand and goals, and then track and benchmark their trust metrics over time,” he told CX Dive.
Why CX must embrace experience innovation
The executive order prioritizes digital interactions, such as claiming benefits online, tools to help file taxes and renewing passports online. The goal is creating a cross-government service delivery process that aligns with specific life experiences where people interact with government agencies.
“There have been other government initiatives around digital experience specifically, but this is different because it’s focused on the full end-to-end experience and digital first is part of it,” Jeannie Walters, CX expert and CEO of Experience Investigators, told CX Dive.
To boost digital operations, the General Services Administration has indicated it’s working on a new tool called the Gov CX Analyzer that will use AI to see how individuals are interacting with government websites.
By tracking interactions, the GSA hopes to understand how to better serve customers, where the friction points are, and how to improve service delivery.
“It should help agencies quickly identify areas for improvement and take action, rather than waiting for lengthy analysis from surveys and other tools,” Walters said.
For brands, it shows that innovative approaches and new tools can accelerate the use of customer feedback and data to deliver experience improvements. Yet to deliver tangible results, the goal needs to be improving interactions for customers, according to Walters.
“Experience is really what drives people now, but without experience innovation, we're not getting the results we should from all the work of collecting feedback and responding,” she said.
It also points to a larger trend Walters has observed that’s relevant to brands as much as the government.
“Every disruption in the last decade-plus has really been experience driven, and so if you’re not focused on this as an industry, organization or government, you’ll be disrupted,” she said.
Brands need innovation around customer experience, but new initiatives need to be linked to relevant metrics and tangible improvements that add to the business, according to Walters.
“It’s a challenge [for many brands] and unfortunately sometimes the result is just tracking something that's easy to understand instead of something that reflects those points of trust,” Walters said.
To avoid this, organizations need to define and standardize metrics, incorporating both operational metrics and direct user feedback. Otherwise, brands can get into the habit of tracking CSAT or NPS and treating numerical improvements as the win.
It can give rise to “number narrators” who closely track metrics without really connecting the dots between specific CX goals and the impact on the organization, such as ROI or increasing market share, Walters said.
“That’s really a measurement and we need to understand what we’re trying to do and how we define success,” she said.
