Page 24 - GCN, May 2017

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
EARNING PUBLIC TRUST IN THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY
Better service delivery hinges on truly understanding citizen experiences
with government.
THINK ABOUT the world’s most successful companies like Apple, Amazon, Airbnb, and JetBlue, and think about their loyal customer bases. What sets them apart?
These organizations have closed the “Experience Gap” that few organizations even know exists. The Experience Gap is a rift between the superior experiences executives think their brand is providing and the reality of customer ambivalence or dissatisfaction. Market leaders thrive because they know they provide consumers with delightful products, branding, and employee interactions, culminating in exemplary consumer experiences. They have earned their customers’ trust.
It’s no secret that federal agencies have fallen short of cultivating experiences that rival those of the private sector – consumers accustomed to one-click ordering do not
take kindly to passport wait times, confusing websites, and black box application processes. However, goals to improve critical public services need not feel out of reach.
Public Perception and Feedback
Knowing how the public perceives your agency is key to correctly interpreting citizen feedback. Just as Coca-Cola invests in its brand to
impact the bottom line, so too, should agencies recognize the role their reputation plays in mission achievement.
In recent years, agencies have significantly bolstered their intent and infrastructure for collecting feedback from the public, most often by way of survey (a cost-efficient medium for millions of two-way conversations). Citizen
and employee satisfaction benchmarks are two such improvements. While they are a step in the right direction, asking, “are you satisfied” is only half of the question. Every time someone interacts with the government, it’s essential
to understand in that moment whether or
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TREVOR DELEW
HEAD OF FEDERAL, QUALTRICS
not they were successful. What specifically hindered success – and if successful, which experiences fell short? How are these shortcomings correlated?
Agency Experience Data
These questions can only be answered at
the enterprise level, after aggregating data
about agency reputation, services, employee engagement, and overall citizen experience.
This is difficult for our government because agencies do not have access to an enterprise Experience Management PlatformTM that
provides a single source of truth for all experience information contextualized by operational evidence of improvement.
Furthermore, gathering and analyzing this data needs to happen quickly, which rarely happens due to cumbersome and fragmented systems. Taking corrective action on months old data – as agencies often do – is akin to buying tickets for a ship that has already sailed.
Citizen Experiences
Prioritizing citizen experiences is particularly important as budgets are reduced, and many agencies will face difficult choices about where
to allocate limited resources. Marrying stores
of existing operational data to new experiential data will offer a transparent view of which
agency initiatives contribute most to the mission. Agencies can fund programs that deliver, and cut those that don’t. Effective measurement is the only way to ensure investments in critical services will have the intended yield.
Consistently engaged citizens will drive positive change within your agency. The power to succeed lies in having real-time access to what they are experiencing.
Trevor DeLew is Head of Federal and Bobbie Browning is Chief Federal Strategist, Qualtrics.
BOBBIE BROWNING
CHIEF FEDERAL STRATEGIST, QUALTRICS
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