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Digital Government

Collaborative approaches to federal customer experience

December 6, 2022 5-MINUTE READ

RESEARCH REPORT

In brief

  • Annually, Accenture and the Partnership for Public Service document the government’s progress on customer experience and profile high-impact services.
  • This year’s report details key initiatives needed to further build a customer-centric mindset and accountability across every government function.
  • It identifies critical ingredients for a customer-centric approach and proposes bold actions to help deliver simple, seamless & secure experiences.

Executive summary

The Biden administration’s customer experience policy strives for more equitable and efficient services for all and is a clear reflection of what a government designed for the people should be. Putting this vision into practice requires addressing obstacles that prevent agencies from addressing the root causes of customer experience challenges. Customers would benefit from a collaborative approach that aligns all elements of government with those customers’ perspectives and needs. The Biden administration should invest in a change management strategy that empowers financial, legal, human resources, data, and technology teams to act in the customer’s interest and targets the root causes of customer experience challenges.

The next phase of improving the federal customer experience should involve building a customer-centric mindset and accountability across every government function. We identified seven key ingredients for accelerating the administration's customer experience goals—all within agencies’ purview today.

  1. Empowered leadership: providing deputy secretaries with the insights, staff and performance management systems to be true champions of improving the customer experience.
  2. An engaged and accountable agency enterprise: generating enterprise-wide customer experience performance expectations for chief financial, information, human capital and other officers.
  3. A knowledge mobilization strategy for customer solutions: making all customer data easily accessible for designing and delivering a better customer experience.
  4. A comprehensive data-sharing policy infrastructure: building common, consistent resources to enable customer-data sharing.
  5. A digital enterprise to support consistent customer experience: investing in enterprise-wide digital talent, solutions and infrastructure to support consistent customer experiences.
  6. External partnerships for expert knowledge and trusted communication: thoughtfully building expert stakeholder partnerships to connect with vulnerable customer groups.
  7. Co-design of services with customers: generating customer co-design strategies that take into consideration technical, physical, emotional, communication and resource barriers and get agencywide buy-in.

Designing a government for the people

Customer experience leaders should be proud of their work putting this critical federal mission at the forefront of innovative policymaking. But addressing the primary root causes of customer experience challenges requires redesigning government so that it can deliver simple, seamless and secure experiences for all eligible customers.

Four bold actions are needed to build a government for the people:

Fully authorize and hire for the talent needs of a customer-centric government, both within and across agencies, and professionalize the customer experience career field.

Fully and flexibly fund customer experience budgets from the customer’s perspective, allowing for cross-agency investments, programs and resources.

Enable common customer data sharing in a secure environment—supported by emerging technologies and centralized data-sharing authorities and agreements—and by passing legislation such as the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act.

Redesign regulatory and statutory customer experience frameworks to streamline recertification, access and eligibility; make COVID-19 driven flexibilities permanent; and build a culture of decision-making that consistently works to the customer’s benefit.

The federal government has entered a new era of customer experience. Though today’s efforts by federal agencies to renew public services build on a decade of reform, recent policy has presented a higher-level vision of simple, seamless and secure customer experiences. This administration’s President’s Management Agenda Vision and the accompanying “Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government” define clear goals for equitable delivery to the public and targeted actions to relieve the administrative burden on government’s customers.

But these mandates demand a seismic shift in how government does business: All parts of government must be designed around customers’ lives and needs. Such an approach doesn’t always align with today’s federal organizational charts or processes. And requiring customers to use systems built for the convenience of government has led to frustration and lesser service quality for the very people government is meant to serve--all of us. “We now need to align our programs, technologies and systems to the customer journey, and not align the customer to our systems,” said Andy Lewandowski, digital experience advisor to the federal chief information officer, Office of Management and Budget.

The Partnership for Public Service and Accenture Federal Services focus on agencies’ readiness for these new policies centering the customer, specifically the requirement to “systematically [identify] and [resolve] the root causes of customer experience challenges.” In other words, what are the key ingredients that enable agencies to design and deliver from a customer’s perspective, and not their own?

A critical requirement for the administration’s vision is to expand the collaborative customer-centric mindset to all agency functions. As agencies collect and analyze data, modernize technology, perform legal reviews and conduct other essential activities, they need to align these systems with how customers live their lives. Teams performing all agency functions—not only customer experience teams—should be accountable for helping people become aware of the services they are eligible for and making it quick and easy for all possible customers to receive those services.

This collective effort can only happen when government offices and agencies coordinate in fundamentally new ways. To illustrate this approach, this report:

  • Establishes a vision for collaborative customer experience.
  • Explores the benefits to customers of agency collaborations to improve customer experience.
  • Identifies critical ingredients for a customer-centric approach across all government functions.
  • Proposes bold actions to design a government for the people and target root causes of customer experience challenges.

For this report, we interviewed customer experience leaders, as well as those who design and implement services at federal agencies. We also had conversations with customer experience experts from national research institutes and universities. Additionally, our work was informed by input from our quarterly customer experience roundtables and by leading commercial practices.

Profiles of high-impact federal services

Read the profiles that examine customers’ experiences with 5 federal services on the Partnership for Public Service’s website:

Each year, thousands of customers who have experienced a disaster rely on services provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help them recover from the impact. FEMA’s Individual Assistance programs provide financial aid and services such as counseling support directly to disaster survivors. Read the profile here.

The U.S. Agency for International Development works in over 100 countries, delivering assistance to reduce poverty, improve health and strengthen democratic governance, among other support. To achieve its mission, USAID awards grants and contracts to partner organizations which then implement programs to address development challenges. Read the profile here.

Virtually everyone in America interacts with the Social Security Administration at some point in their lives, from receiving a Social Security number at birth to relying on SSA’s retirement services for financial security after they have stopped working. SSA provides services over the phone, at field offices across the country, and through its website. Read the profile here.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department issues millions of passports every year to people who want to travel to countries around the world. In fiscal 2021, the bureau issued more than 15 million of these vital documents. Read the profile here.

The Office of Personnel Management administers the Civil Service Retirement System and Federal Employees Retirement System—which provide benefits to retired public servants. Many federal employees and retirees, and their families, rely on the annuities and other benefits they are entitled to for financial security. Read the profile here.

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