This content is sponsored by Tableau.

President Joe Biden’s administration signaled its focus on customer experience in November, when it made the second highest priority in the President’s Management Agenda “delivering excellent, equitable and secure federal services and customer experiences.” In December, the administration doubled down on this objective with an executive order aimed at improving customer experience and the equity of public-facing services.

The EO directs agencies to modernize programs, reduce administrative burdens, and pilot new online tools and technologies that can provide a simple and seamless customer experience. It gives Federal Chief Information Officer Clare Martorana and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs four months to issue guidance that reduces the burden of collecting information from customers. That guidance will also direct agencies on how to effectively share customer experience data with each other, as well as state and local governments.

But that’s easier said than done.

“With the omni-channel approach to service delivery nowadays, interaction data is being generated in many, often disparate systems. So integrating all of that data into one platform where it can be analyzed all together, instead of in silos, is really critical to understanding and improving customer experience,” said Ed Weber public sector solutions architect at Tableau. “As agencies are delivering more services online because of the pandemic and constituents’ heightened expectations, the amount of data and interactions will only continue to grow.”

Some agencies have already started addressing this; a handful have appointed Chief Customer Experience Officers within the past few years. But for the most part, those efforts to begin centralizing customer experience data are the exception, while siloes remain the rule. That makes investment decisions around customer experience difficult, and impedes efforts to scale up customer service and contact centers, identify trends and patterns within engagement data, and create new customer interaction channels or retire underperforming channels.

“A lot of government investment is going to be controlled by what’s going to get the most bang for the buck. So if we’re finding that more and more people are visiting our website, but the experience is bad, maybe we still want to invest a lot in that because we know that’s where we’re going to get the highest return on our investment and get the most improvement in customer experience,” said Ed Weber, public sector solutions architect at Tableau. “And the reality is, most of these various channels and the solutions that are used to gather that information are from a variety of vendors and stored in a variety of different data sources. And oftentimes they may have individual metrics around how they individually perform. For example, how is my interactive voice response solution performing? I might know that on a siloed basis, but to be able to pull that together with other data sources to understand the full picture of customer experience, not just by one individual channel, but across different departments within an agency is really critical.”

So how can agencies accomplish this and begin to meet the customer experience goals set out in the PMA and EO?

Recent developments at the Agriculture Department may serve as a model for how agencies can move forward. It launched AskUSDA to serve as the single “front door” to deliver a centralized contact center experience that aims to help customers get consistent and streamlined information. The program supports customer inquiries through the web, on the phone, through an online chat or email. Through analysis with its IT Modernization Center of Excellence, USDA consolidated 748 services that tried to serve 903 unique customer attributes.

Tableau powers the robust customer analytics behind AskUSDA resulting in deeper actionable insights. Tableau dashboards and AI-powered analytics enable administrators to track operational performance metrics while analyzing interactions and survey data.

And those analytics and visualizations don’t just provide insights at the highest level; they scale throughout the organization to facilitate decision making from the C-Suite all the way down to the individual program manager level.

“The initial thought people have is that the Chief Customer Experience Officer or some executive would have the ‘Great and Powerful Oz’ dashboard. They would look at it and say, ‘I know everything.’ But the reality is, analytics is really executed at a very small scale in most organizations. And so the pervasive use of analytics across the enterprise is where the largest return on this type of investment goes. So individuals who cover just the websites, for example — or even a subset of those — want to have analytics at their fingertips      so they can make better decisions about how to organize the content that they’re responsible for, all the way up to the highest levels of individuals within an organization,” Weber said. “And really, I think what the Biden administration is looking for is a way of seeing this at the highest levels: How is government itself performing from a customer experience perspective?”

Designing and delivering equitable customer experiences requires an analytics platform that integrates disparate data, making analytics accessible to users for a full understanding of your customers and your performance. Providing real-time views of key metrics and incorporating predictive analytics can identify service gaps, improve outcomes, increase operational efficiencies and optimize workforce productivity, leading to a better customer experience at every touchpoint.

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