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Customer experience (CX) and communications have been intuitively tied together in industry and in our day-to-day lives for a long time, but that has not been the case in government until recently. With the emergence of CX officers, executive orders, and various mandates that require government agencies to enhance their customer service, communication has proven integral in implementing improvements that provide increased accessibility, ease-of-use, and equity in service delivery.

The Customer Journey

Mapping the customer journey involves a range of processes. By examining CX through the lens of communications, government agencies can uncover actionable insights to improve citizen-facing services. For the first time, leadership in horizontal positions — roles that aim to break down silos and foster collaboration across different departments or agencies — can tie the pieces of the customer journey together in a more comprehensive way. To accomplish this, agencies should focus on four main phases of communication:

Awareness
Trust and consideration
Decision and action
Engagement and management

Tangible results emerge that improve CX over time when the customer journey is broken down into these four phases. Citizens must be aware of digital services on agencies’ websites to take advantage of them; and agencies must convey trust to drive citizens to make a decision to enroll in a program. Agencies must then implement steps to continue to engage and nurture people through the customer journey. Utilizing this approach allows government agencies to tie CX and communications together.

The Digital Transformation of CX

One of the biggest challenges facing government is ensuring people are aware of the services available to them, particularly those underserved populations who have not participated in programs in the past. Digital and communications staff must work together to ensure that programs, services, and benefits are utilized and remain funded.

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It is important that agencies recognize that digital transformation is more than simply replicating forms as a digital service. Pairing digital solutions with the communications layer presents government with a critical opportunity to engage with people through authentic digital transformation. Simply making a form into a PDF and posting it on an agency’s website is not digital transformation.

Moving from a “lift and shift” perspective of replicating the brick-and-mortar experience to adopting a truly integrated experience can be daunting but it is an essential component in building genuine customer engagement and improving CX. Email and SMS have been critical in reaching underserved and at-risk populations, as well as struggling citizens seeking government services.

Frequent engagement is the foundation for trust and consideration in government communications. Navigating government bureaucracy can be challenging, but through more thoughtful digital transformation of services, agencies can reduce the burden on the people trying to use them. Many government benefits have gone unclaimed in the past because individuals were unaware or unable to navigate an agency’s website. Minimizing these barriers through clear, frequent communications can enhance trust and ensure that citizens receive the services they are entitled to.

Transparency builds credibility and trust, and meaningful communication builds transparency. By being proactively transparent during the development of applications for digital services, agencies can ensure that the unseen parts of the customer journey are considered.

Meeting citizens where they are with simple, seamless, and secure services is another way federal agencies can reduce user burden in CX and help people move toward decision and action. Despite limited resources, agencies can meaningfully impact CX by using existing assets and data to create mobile-friendly programs and increase accessibility across devices.

Measuring Meaningful Improvements in CX

Translating customer awareness and trust into a measurable outcome requires people to be engaged in and understand the steps of the process. Communications and CX directly contribute to achieving mission outcomes when they are effectively tied together. Measuring communications metrics — like subscribers and click and open rates — demonstrates how many people considered the information they received as important enough to engage with. Government agencies can implement more customized and personalized communication strategies when they start measuring engagement.

Managing and interpreting metrics while continuing to connect with users is critical to maintaining the communications cycle and building even deeper connections. Building an audience is not just about increasing numbers: It is just as critical to keep the audience interested and engaged to create a seamless encounter.

Transparent communications — whether email, SMS, or phone calls — help manage expectations and improve overall customer experience. In 2023, the federal government sent 150 million text messages and around 12 billion emails, highlighting the importance of efficient digital communication. Government agencies build trust through consistent and reliable interactions when they invest in CX.

Proactive communication is key to transforming and managing CX over time, rather than treating it as an afterthought or only seeing it as accumulated numbers. Investing in CX improves trust and engagement, ensures clear and effective digital communications, and builds relationships, helping to maximize the return on investment for government agencies.

For more on this discussion, watch Charlotte Lee, the Strategic Lead for CX and Innovation at Granicus, on the Federal News Network webinar, “How agencies are ‘reaching people where they are’ through effective CX communications”.

Customer experience pervades every aspect of what the government does — and some might argue, why it exists. What’s more, it has become profoundly clear that everyone is a customer. There are the obvious customers, people across the nation. But then there are current and former federal employees, businesses large and small, the government’s contracting community, other agencies and even other nations. Likely, there are more. Unlike a private company, a federal agency often has no competitor for its services. That fact has created a lag in the evolution of federal CX and digital services — relative to what businesses and nongovernment organizations typically provide today and what people now expect. Agencies are on it now though. The presidential executive order on customer experience of December 2021 targets the need to evolve CX and points up the destructive affect that poor service delivery has on public trust. Download the guide to learn how to meet the expectations of the public, as well as the many other customers agencies serve, with a multipronged strategy that focuses on culture, processes and technology.

Want to Enhance Customer Experience? Here’s Where to Start

“The key to the success of Farmers.gov is its simplicity, Bremby said. USDA has put all the information farmers need in a single place and made it easy for them to complete the necessary processes to receive services. USDA consolidated seven digital systems and 150 web resources into one intelligent platform that follows a user’s progress. And that, Bremby noted, is the biggest metric for success in customer experience: Did the customer complete the transaction? Or did they drop off somewhere in the middle of the process, like abandoning a cart while shopping online?”

Read more insights from Rod Bremby, Regional Vice President for Global Public Sector at Salesforce.

Meaningful Communication Creates the Foundation for Good Customer Experience

“Agencies are familiar with traditional communications media. They engage with public relations firms and the news media to promote stories. They conduct public awareness campaigns across every available platform, from bus stop advertisements to social media, and they tend to be pretty good at driving broad awareness. Where they fall short though, Peterson said, is more granular, personalized messaging.”

Read more insights from Angy Peterson, Vice President at Granicus.

How Federal Agencies can Pivot to Experience-driven Government

“People who rely on government services are usually accessing them at critical junctures in their lives, often moments of profound need. They’re looking for relief in the aftermath of a natural disaster, for public health data during an epidemic, for financial stability in retirement, and for ways to prepare for growth or cope with losses affecting their families and businesses. That’s why agencies need to pivot to experience-driven government, meeting citizens where they’re at in their journeys and connecting them with the right services at the right time.”

Read more insights from James Hanson, Head of Industry Strategy for the Public Sector at Adobe.

Don’t Let a Cyber Staff Shortage Weaken Your Defenses

“Federal agencies are taking note and have started making significant strides toward digital transformation, driven in no small part by recent directives, including the president’s executive order on customer experience. While competitive pressures often motivate private sector enterprises to invest in innovation, the government’s greatest competition is usually the status quo. Agencies have been delivering services in the same way for so long that impacting change requires redirecting institutional inertia — to say nothing of overcoming budgetary obstacles. One way for agencies to get started on this journey is to begin digitizing agreements.”

Read more insights from Michael “MJ” Jackson, Vice President and Global Head of Industries at DocuSign.

Here are 3 Phases to Begin Modernizing Customer Experience Right Away

“For years, agencies have been researching, modernizing and overhauling how customers experience doing business with the federal government. Over the course of several presidential administrations, with the help of Office of Management and Budget mandates, presidential executive orders and an influx of customer experience talent, there has been a noticeable shift toward organizational CX management approaches. Agencies have an opportunity to take full advantage of technological advances to improve customer experience management capacity at scale. Advances in cloud technology, data analytics and new communications channels have opened up new avenues to improve an agency’s capability to design and deliver services for both customers and federal employees.”

Read more insights from Matt Chong, Vice President of Federal at Qualtrics.

Download the full Expert Edition for more insights from these customer experience leaders and additional government interviews, historical perspectives and industry research.