Page 13 - FCW, January/February 2021

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Risk Management”). The activities include developing a framework for digital services, improving and digitizing citizen experience, and enhancing identity management and privacy protections.
Federal agencies are also heeding the lessons from the pandemic. In a recent survey of FCW readers, 81% of respondents said their agencies’ response to COVID-19 was improving the way they delivered services for citizens, employees and partners. When asked how their agencies’ commitment to citizen-focused services
had changed in the past year, 73% cited an improvement as a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5, and only 6% said such services had become less important.
In terms of respondents’ CX priorities in 2021, providing citizen services digitally and improving employee management, especially for remote workers, topped the list at 63% and 59%, respectively, followed by accelerating IT modernization at 48%.
The growing emphasis on trust
In a Jan. 15 post on Performance.gov, federal officials shared insights from 2.2 million responses to public surveys on government CX. They concluded that digital modernization improves trust and satisfaction, and the ease and efficiency of services “strongly correlate to satisfaction and trust in websites and services completed online.”
The issue of trust is receiving greater
attention elsewhere in government, and some experts believe trust is more important than customer satisfaction, especially when it comes to government services. In its 2020 update of Circular A-11 guidance on budget preparation, the Office of Management and Budget
revised Section 280 on “Managing Customer Experience and Improving Service Delivery” to add details on best practices for measuring and managing CX. Section 280 also instructs agencies to look beyond satisfaction and create trust scores based on customer survey data.
In addition, the authors of a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research last year explore the links between quality
of government and citizen happiness. Their research was inspired in part by “a growing dissatisfaction with using GDP per capita
as a sufficient measure of human progress.” Among their conclusions: “Trust is an asset partly due to government actions, and is good for happiness in its own right as well as aiding the achievement of other policy objectives.” Furthermore, they note that the quality of government service delivery “is significantly correlated with national happiness.”
The message for agencies is that providing services that exceed customer demands sets the stage for greater success in all mission areas. Furthermore, by investing in IT modernization and digital services, agencies can build trust in government services and sharpen their customer-first focus.
Digital Services
BY THE NUMBERS
81%
FCW survey respondents who said the pandemic has improved the way their agencies deliver customer services
75%
States that deployed chatbots to help answer questions about topics related to COVID-19
1/3
Air Force employees who may continue working remotely after the pandemic subsides
0.1% to 43.5%
Increase in Medicare primary care visits conducted via telehealth from February to April 2020
61.1 out of 100
Average federal score on Forrester’s 2020 CX Index
Sources: Association of Defense Communities, Department of Health and Human Services, FCW, Forrester Research, National Association of State CIOs
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