A new report from the Partnership for Public Service and Accenture Federal Services lays out the need for federal agencies to align their systems with how customers live their lives in order to deliver a seamless, simple, and secure customer experience.
Titled “Designing a Government for the People: Collaborative Approaches to Federal Customer Experience,” the report provides federal agencies with a concrete path to understanding and addressing customer experience challenges, citing exclusive findings from interviews with experts within the federal government, academic institutions, and national research institutes.
Designing a government centered around its customers is no small challenge. The report’s authors call for four bold actions that are needed in order to successfully center services around their customers:
Fully authorizing and hiring for the talent needs of a customer-centric government will provide the people required to re-work federal systems; fully and flexibly funding customer experience budgets from a customer’s perspective will help agencies combine their investments, programs, and resources needed; establishing a framework to enable secure common customer data sharing will simplify IT infrastructure and build a more seamless experience; and redesigning regulatory and statutory customer experience frameworks will support the streamlining of recertification, access, and eligibility.
“When we give federal agencies the correct tools to implement positive change in their customer experience systems, they do so effectively. In our report, we identify seven key steps for achieving a customer-centric mindset across all federal agencies,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, Vice President of Research, Evaluation, and Modernizing Government at the Partnership for Public Service. “Specifically, our final recommendation, to co-design services with customers, has me excited about the potential for future interactions with the government. If agencies listen to customers first, they can overcome historic physical, emotional, and resource barriers. We invite stakeholders to join us in learning more about how to build a government for the people at our virtual Federal Customer Experience Summit.”
By shifting to a deeply-embedded, customer-centric mindset, federal agencies will be able to design customer journeys that mirror life experiences, ensuring that some of the most vulnerable populations will have equitable access to services as well as a better experience navigating them.
