Federal agencies are actively working to better meet the evolving needs of their customers and citizens, increasing customer engagement on networked customer experience (CX). The value of improved CX is no longer a question—as mission and technology leaders realize they spend 15 to 25 percent more budget to serve stakeholders when systems are not optimized for experience.

Beyond the value that CX provides to stakeholders and mission effectiveness, federal mandates such as OMB Circular A-11 Section 280 and the 21st Century IDEA Act have made this investment area an immediate focus of agencies’ modernization roadmaps. 

But where should your organization start?

We partner with federal agencies at different stages of their CX journey. Some have already stood up a customer experience office, and others aren’t sure where to begin or if a central function is even necessary. While every organization requires a unique approach to match its mission and customer needs, here are four common investments to start optimizing for CX at your agency.

Customer experiences are becoming more complex than ever before. From advances in the private sector, citizens are getting used to networked experiences—where they can seamlessly and simultaneously create value with multiple providers. As service ecosystems become more integrated and layered, the ability to rapidly respond to feedback and pivot is paramount to meet customer needs.

In this increasingly complex environment, organizations must distill which data and outcomes are most important to track to know how customers are using services and when to improve interactions. Before launching a significant CX program, the ability to bring together the most important information sources and extract meaningful insights can inform subsequent CX investments and can help measure any resulting impact on the bottom line.

Having a single platform that consolidates data from traditional and non-traditional CX data (e.g. surveys, chat logs, audio transcripts, social media, etc.) and supports robust analysis are critical components to success. Experience data should be centrally collected, analyzed and shared in an experience management system that supports access and collaboration across an organization’s business units to address customer needs, enable more personalized and tailored interactions, flag concerns in real time, and conduct enterprise-level analytics.   

Equally important to a quantitative understanding of your customers and service ecosystem is the deep, qualitative, and human understanding you get from observing your customers in their real worlds. What do they expect and desire from your organization and the rest of the ecosystem? Wherever your organization is on its CX transformation journey, there are likely pockets already employing ethnographic research. Since the research conducted by individual business units or mission areas is typically specific to its particular needs, organizations still require general research to understand the underlying context for the customer’s interaction with that service.

Take, for example, the ethnographic/user research conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) across its various agencies and services as part of a broader effort to enhance CX at all digital touchpoints. To better understand its customers, the agency mapped its findings into an ecosystem uniting customer journeys across varied USDA services. That work allowed them to develop tools and guidelines to modernize USDA's web applications to comply with the 21st Century IDEA Act and to enhance customer-facing applications. These services now work together to help the USDA create more intuitive, efficient, and effective experiences that map to real customers.

Conducting customer research and design projects demonstrates a commitment to CX, and if customers are included in the process, can serve to strengthen loyalty and create advocates for your organization.

Use your relationships with different business units to build a coalition of practitioners and business leaders to push the customer-centered agenda forward. These supporters will be essential for creating complex and non-intuitive services, third-party partnerships, and value exchanges to defend and strengthen your position in the networked ecosystem. These types of services will rarely be the purview of a single business unit and instead will likely require collaboration across many. In short, make friends across your organization: You’re going to need them to really make a difference.

Advancing this implicit support infrastructure to a more rigorous governance model, organizations can turn a loose coalition of the passionate into an effective cross-organizational working group. Invite your network of experienced advocates to be members of the governance board and rotate them regularly to spread around the opportunity to engage.

What’s measured can be managed. Such a working group should review findings and analyze experience data from your centralized measurement lead, using these insights to prioritize and refine future research plans or CX improvement projects. 

Organizations can’t afford to spend months or years navi­gating lengthy contracting processes or interpreting policy nuances. Luckily, there are resources to drive these efforts forward at federal agencies:

• Over the past few years several federal organizations and programs have been established including the United States Digital Service, the Lab at OPM, the General Services Administration’s 18F and their IT Modernization Center of Excellence for Customer Experience, to help navigate the rapidly changing experience landscape.
• Congressional legislation, President’s Management Agenda CAP Goals, and Office of Management and Budget standards and guidelines have been estab­lished to provide the impetus to help drive and justify your approach.
• Lighthouse agencies (e.g., USDA) and lead agency partners (e.g., the Department of Veterans Affairs) for CX have been identified to blaze the trail and provide a successful blueprint to follow.

These organizations and programs have been consistently knocking down barriers to enhancing CX, including providing access to appropriate and accelerated contracting vehicles, consultative and advisory services at the application, service, and programmatic levels; best practices and toolkits; and thought leadership.