Few organizations have more customers, with so many varied experiences, than the U.S. federal government.
With more than 435 agencies and sub-agencies that employ nearly three million people, the government serves a nation of more than 334 million people. Multitudes of them will interact with their governmental representatives at some point.
The sheer magnitude of the federal presence makes good customer experience essential to building public trust.
Yet by most accounts, the government has failed to earn that trust. “When it comes to government services, Americans are very dissatisfied with their customer experience,” McKinsey Corp. said in a study that ranked federal and state government services “dead last” compared with experience with industries such as airlines, banking, or even car insurance. “Engaging with government services can be hard, and navigating multiple government agencies can be even harder,” it said.
Federal Agencies Are Trying To Improve Customer Experience
But upgrades may be afoot, even if they have yet to capture widespread attention. During a recent webinar on federal customer experience strategies, three of the most prominent customer-facing agencies – the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – detailed a myriad of recent initiatives that appear to be showing concrete improvements to better serve the public.
Officials from each agency expressed their strong desires to overcome the government’s image among some as a bloated bureaucracy that lacks the nimble, innovative approach of the private sector.
In doing so, they sounded like downright customer experience professionals. “Communicate, communicate, communicate. You cannot communicate about customer experience enough,” said Courtney Kay-Decker, Deputy Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer at an agency not exactly widely beloved among customers: the IRS.
Using the vantage point of an IRS call center employee, she compellingly explained a topic of significant interest to customer experience pros: The difference between customer service and customer experience.
“It’s very easy to say, ‘I gave great service on that phone call and get fabulous (customer) ratings,” Kay-Decker said. “But if, at the end of the day, the taxpayer’s problem isn’t solved and they get another notice from us or whatever, that was not a good experience.”
“Getting that mindset of the customer journey is super important as you’re developing customer experience in your agency,” she told her federal colleagues.
That’s good advice for anyone interested in creating a superior experience, in any setting. As my WISER methodology — Witty, Immersive, Shareable, Extraordinary, and Responsive – makes clear, customer experience is indeed a journey that should culminate with the customer – in government or industry — feeling well served and fulfilled.
IRS Uses New Funding To Shorten Wait Times
The government’s recent focus on experience stems from the Biden administration’s December 2021 executive order on transforming federal customer experience. It directed officials to focus on people in everything they do, laying out 36 customer experience improvement commitments across 17 federal agencies. Yet by most accounts, the government has failed to earn that trust. The order followed the Trump administration’s President’s Management Agenda in 2018, which also made customer experience a priority.
The shift to viewing people as customers was followed by the passage in 2022 of the Inflation Reduction Act, which appropriated $80 billion to modernize the IRS over 10 years. The agency spotted a chance to use some of the funds to improve customer experience.
Among the IRS’s achievements since then: telephone wait times have dropped from 27 minutes in 2022 to just four minutes in 2023, while numerous taxpayer assistance centers have opened.
“It’s an exciting time to be at the IRS … customer experience is such an important conversation across our agency,” Kay-Decker said during the webinar. “We have top line focus … on how do we better delivering our services to our taxpayers, our tax professionals, and anyone else who needs to interact with us.”
Other improvements she highlighted: with its expanded option of calling taxpayers back, the IRS saved more than three million hours of telephone wait time this year alone. The agency has also added new features to online accounts and taken steps to make written notices to taxpayers shorter and more easily readable.
“Simple, seamless, and secure – those are the words we live by,” Kay-Decker summed up.
Veteran Experience At The VA Improves Dramatically
At the VA, which operates the nation’s largest integrated health care network serving nine million veterans each year – officials realized back in 2015 that they needed to improve customer experience. So they opened a veteran’s experience office. “We wanted to operationalize customer experience as a core business discipline at the VA,” Barbara Morton, the VA’s Deputy Chief Veteran Experience Officer, said at the webinar.
VA officials interviewed veterans, asking about their pain points in dealing with the department, and designed their first patient experience program. More customer experience surveys followed, along with trainings and leadership seminars for employees.
The result: Veteran trust in VA outpatient care hit 91.8 percent this year, up from 85.4 percent in 2017. And with the department’s customer experience focus also including improvements to the disability benefit experience, overall veteran trust in VA programs has jumped from 55 percent in 2016 to more than 80 percent this year.
“Kudos to our employees in the department who have really, really embraced the concept of customer experience,” said Morton.
DHS Reduces Paperwork Burden On Public
At DHS, which was established following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the customer experience challenge stems from the department’s pure size. DHS includes more than two dozen agencies and offices that do everything from protecting critical infrastructure to administering the immigration system.
That’s a lot of paperwork for people to fill out.
So the department embarked on a program to lower what it calls the “burden hours” on the public. It began initiatives such as Global Entry – a U.S. Customs and Border Protection program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States – and touchless ID that verifies airport travelers through facial recognition.
The effort eliminated more than 21 million burden hours last year, Dana Chisnell, DHS’s Executive Director for Customer Experience, said at the webinar.
Filling out the department’s various forms “is a lot of work for the public,” she said. “It’s a time tax that we want to make sure that we are lowering as much as possible … for example, if we have your data already, we don’t need to ask you for that again.”
Chisnell added that DHS is intensively training employees in “customer experience literacy” and is focused on “continuing the great momentum that we have built over many years in customer experience.”
Federal Government Customer Experience Improvement Can Be A Matter Of Basic Tech and Business Savvy
The webinar was hosted by Federal News Network, and moderator Luke McCormack summed up the session by thanking the participants for their efforts – and noting that while emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) help fuel customer experience advances, some of the improvements described by speakers are more elementary.
“You don’t have to have highly sophisticated AI, ChatGPT technology,” he said. “Here we have some of the basic technology meeting customers where they are and enhancing that experience…which I just think is awesome.”
Photo by: Photo by Karl Callwood on Unsplash.
