Customer service in the private sector bottomed out in mid-2022. The American Customer Service Index found it was at the lowest levels in 17 years.

The good news by the fourth quarter of 2022, that downward trend started to bounce back.

At the same time, ACSI found satisfaction with federal agencies saw a four point increase in 2022 over 2021. Agencies still, however, are well below the satisfaction rate of the private sector by almost 10 points.

Chris Gianutsos, the managing director for digital at EY, said agencies have a great opportunity to learn from the private sector and address long-standing challenges around customer service and improve the citizen experience.

“One of the things that we’re really passionate about is taking a human-centered design approach to these transformations. And by that, I mean, really starting with those end customers, or those end constituents, first, develop personas or profiles of what those individuals need and the emotional state that they’re going through whether they’re applying for benefits or trying to get a license or start a business,” Gianutsos said on the discussion Government Modernization Unleashed: Digital literacy. “What things are really important for you as a government organization to get right in terms of the experience that you’re providing them? That outside in view is a little bit of a different methodology from the traditional modernization efforts, which typically start with process improvement or a very inside out view of the world. I think that’s critically important as you are looking for those efficiencies, looking for ways to take cost out or to make the processes work faster is really important.”

The first step for many agencies is to answer the question of what does the end result look like from a customer experience perspective.

Process improvements

Gianutsos said then agencies can break down the processes that lead to improvements and efficiencies.

“Where do things take too long? Where do we have pieces of technology that don’t talk to each other that need to? Or maybe some agencies that don’t work together today need to in order to provide that experience,” he said. “Then you can decompose that into the requirements and capabilities. One of maybe the best examples or corollaries that I that I often get when I’m talking to my clients is to think about the financial services industry. I think there are a lot of parallels between financial services and the government. What those institutions have done a really nice job of over the last 10-15 years is hiding some of that internal complexity, and some of the differences in the technology stack from the customer. You log into your bank account, and you see all of your different your accounts in one place, your different service options for things that might be relevant to you are all in that initial portal experience.”

The idea is the service is seamless to the user and all the hard technology and process changes happen behind the scenes.

Gianutsos said the advancement of technology over the last several years is giving agencies the opportunity to “hide” those back-end services from the users.

“A lot of the new experiences we’re seeing are being built on low code, no code platforms, where it’s really more of a configuration discussion, rather than bringing in a team of developers to write code from scratch. That transition is difficult, but the new tooling has certainly made it easier for agencies to begin to experiment with more modern types of experiences that work on a variety of devices, and that that lend themselves to conformance to those form factors without having to develop exclusively for each of those platforms,” he said. “If we look at cloud computing and the way data can now be stored, manipulated and used to drive certain types of experiences, all of those factors are certainly making it easier for agencies and the private sector, quite frankly, to begin to do things in a way that they couldn’t have even imagined a decade or two ago.”

Taking smart risks to innovate

Now that agencies have access and are more comfortable using similar technology platforms as the private sector, the opportunity to focus on enhancing customer experience is now.

Gianutsos said the next thing for agencies to overcome is to increase their risk tolerance by taking smart chances.

“One of the most interesting differences is I think about the conversations that I had with my private sector clients versus public sector is private sector clients always bring me a new idea. I want to do something innovative, I want to do something that no one else has done. I want to try something new. And yes, there’s degrees of risk tolerance depending on sector and the individual you’re talking to you but there is there is much more of this attitude of I want to do something new,” he said. “Whereas in the public sector, there is still very much a I want to do something new, but I want to know that you’ve done this exact thing this way three other times, and so that risk tolerance is probably the biggest differentiating factor.”

The other factor in improving customer experience is agencies need to improve their employees’ experience as well.

Employees need tools and data to do their jobs more efficiently, and that will lead to better customer service.

“I think establishing the individuals within the organization who are change champions, who understand how things work, but also understand how they would like to make things better, and then by using them as your evangelists to help talk about what the future can bring, and how it’s not necessarily a threat, can take away some of the frustrations that others may have,” Gianutsos said. “What we find when we do this work with agencies is there’s usually a lot of people who know exactly where to fix things in order to make the overall customer experience better. Getting those people and raising their profile, giving them the ability to really drive some of those change and see the impact of that is a way to bring a lot of the organization along. There are other techniques, certainly you need good top-down sponsorship, and someone who can set a bold vision and say, ‘this is what we’re going to do.’ This vision may actually span administrations or span natural breaks in the organizational structure, but it’s the right thing to do.”

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