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Citizen experience in government takes center stage

by Bruce Chew, Jeneanne Rae, Jason Manstof, Stine Degnegaard
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    6 minute read 24 June 2019

    Citizen experience in government takes center stage Treating citizens like customers to drive triple value impact

    6 minute read 24 June 2019
    • Bruce Chew United States
    • Jeneanne Rae United States
    • Jason Manstof United States
    • Stine Degnegaard United States
    • Stine Degnegaard United States
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    Coinciding with the digital wave, governments worldwide are increasingly focusing on customer experience as they seek to improve customer satisfaction, efficiency, and mission-effectiveness.

    What do most successful companies have in common? They provide an exceptional customer experience (Cx). Leading companies know that putting customers at the heart of everything they do plays a critical role in improving overall performance.

    Learn more

    View Government Trends 2020

    Download the full report or create a custom PDF

    Subscribe to receive related content

    In the same way, governments around the globe are recognizing the central importance of the citizen experience—and devoting resources to making it better.

    The public sector has long sought to improve customer satisfaction, but raising additional resources or diverting existing resources to achieve this has met with resistance. Thanks to recent advances in digital technologies, however, coupled with new insights from behavioral science, governments worldwide are pursuing Cx more seriously. Government leaders who are looking to make a triple value impact—improving customer satisfaction, increasing efficiency, and enhancing mission-effectiveness—are increasingly focusing on Cx as a core function of government.1

    This coincides with the digital wave in government. Worldwide, agencies such as the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Services,2 Singapore’s Government Technology Agency,3 and the Canadian Digital Services4 are dedicated to using digital technologies to improve the experience of citizens, businesses, and government employees. In the United States, the Office of Management and Budget in 2018 directed all executive branch agencies to incorporate Cx into their strategic decisions, culture, and design of services. Halfway across the globe, Design for Europe, a massive program cosponsored by the European Commission, is working to elevate Cx by promoting design awareness and knowledge exchange.5

    Government-funded design centers

    Government agencies are embracing a number of different but highly complementary approaches in their Cx efforts, reflecting different starting points, missions, and challenges:

    Human-centered design: Ensuring changes are designed outside-in. Human-centered design views problems from the lens of the user and develops solutions that consider their needs. While human-centered design promises a better Cx, it can also increase program buy-in, improve processes and efficiencies, and lower errors and costs in government programs.

    Public-sector agencies across the globe are scaling efforts to develop citizen-centric services. The US Department of Veteran Affairs redesigned its website to create a more personalized experience for its customers and to eliminate the need for multiple logins, while Singapore’s Ministry of Health used creative communication strategies that focused on citizen engagement to improve health care outreach.6 In South America, Chile’s government innovation lab has used human-centered design (with cocreation) to tackle problems in health care, emergency housing, and energy.7

    What’s more, many of these initiatives have yielded significant payoffs. The Department of Veteran Affairs website overhaul led to a 50 percent jump in online health care applications by veterans over the previous year.8 In another example, as part of New Zealand’s service innovation initiative, SmartStart helps new parents and caregivers more easily access a range of digital services during pregnancy and the months following birth, and allows them to establish a digital identity for their child.9 It has saved new parents many thousands of in-person visits to government offices.10

    Service design: Integrating “front-stage” and “back-stage” elements. Service design marries human-centered design with other workflow tools to organize processes, technologies, and infrastructure to improve the quality of interactions between government and its customers. This integrated intervention can improve productivity, efficiency, and mission-effectiveness as well.

    Governments are utilizing service design to improve both “back-stage” processes and front-facing interfaces. For example, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) used service design to improve the experience of small businesses and individual inventors new to pursuing patents and trademarks, many of whom were frustrated by the application process. It started by learning more about every step of new users’ experiences. This led the USPTO to create a “New to IP” link on its homepage that redirected new users to FAQs and a complete process path to applying for patent and trademarks, as well as quick and easy fixes, such as a cheat sheet on how to fill out the forms. These changes enabled small businesses and inventors to better navigate the patent process.

    Inclusive design: Extending human-centered design further. The concept of inclusive design or universal design has also been gaining ground with governments, to help make their programs and services accessible to every citizen. What began with an emphasis on physical infrastructure to accommodate physical handicaps, such as lowering curbs and adding ramps to accommodate wheelchairs, has expanded to foster digital democracy and accommodate different languages as well as mental handicaps.

    Examples of such initiatives include the partnership between UNICEF and the Government of Kenya to design accessible education for disabled children, Norway’s comprehensive “Universal Design Plan” to build “empathic” infrastructure, and the United Kingdom’s Sunderland City Council’s design-based approach to tackle long-term unemployment.11

    Interestingly, innovations in artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of smartphones are enabling a new wave of inclusive design. For example, during 2018, Melbourne’s Southern Cross railway station conducted a pilot to help the visually impaired navigate inside the station. The eight-month project brought together national, state, city, and nonprofit resources to create and promote a real-time system that connected beacons installed at various points within the railway station to Blindsquare, a free GPS app that provides spoken directional advice through a smartphone.12

    Measuring customer experience: Providing an informed foundation. Cx measurement platforms track an individual’s experience in order to prioritize improvements to the customer journey. For example, the Federal Acquisition Service at the US General Services Administration used feedback from its 2018 Customer Satisfaction Survey to improve services and savings for customers. The agency used fleet category management techniques to bring down the procurement time by 50 percent, reduce installation time by 26 percent, and realize cost savings of 20 percent.13 Better data drives better design, and better design drives citizen satisfaction.

    Cocreation: Inviting the public’s input to improve services. Government does not just provide services to citizens; citizens also provide “services” back to the government. The most obvious example of this is when citizens elect leaders, but it can also be extended to solution design and even policy development. For example, Portugal’s participatory budget lets citizens present their investment ideas and vote on which projects to fund and implement. The budgeting process has two phases. First, citizens submit proposals via the website or in participatory meetings. They then vote on the regional and national projects they would like to see implemented. Portugal is the first nation to implement participatory budgeting at a national level. The budget’s second edition in 2018 received 1,418 proposals, of which 692 were voted on.14

    Governments are increasingly embracing codesigning solutions with citizens. Some examples include South Korea’s Civic Participatory Service Design Team, which engages citizens in developing policy solutions; Denmark’s “cocreate” campaign for collectively building environmental solutions; and the US city of Albuquerque’s “design days” for codesigning solutions with small immigrant entrepreneurs.15

    As governments become more digitally mature, Cx will be a cornerstone of government success, offering multiple dimensions of value. Cx tools can also be applied to the employee experience, which will in turn improve Cx. More broadly, as Cx becomes a core capability, it calls attention to not only the customer and employee experiences, but also the values, beliefs, and ambitions that drive behaviors and actions—what Deloitte is calling the human experience.16 However, agencies should also be careful of pitfalls associated with Cx initiatives, such as the failure to coordinate across agencies and delays in decision-making due to user testing fatigue.17 To help address these and other issues, government agencies have started hiring chief customer or citizen experience officers.18

    Data signals

    • Eighteen out of 28 EU countries have government-funded national design centers for policy and service design.
    • The United Kingdom’s cross-government design community that works on human-centered design and user experience has more than 800 people.19
    • The Lab, housed within the US Office of Personnel Management, has trained more than 2,000 government employees in human-centered design.20

    Moving forward

    • Inventory where you are or where you can collect customer data. Include qualitative and quantitative data. Go beyond sentiment to incorporate operational and financial data, which might require extending data collection activities.
    • Standardize collection across channels with a clear architecture to roll up the data.
    • Use analytics to derive insights from the data and prioritize changes.
    • Infuse a holistic customer perspective informed by data into your design and decision process at all levels.
    • Continuously improve Cx, incorporating new approaches and tools and leveraging data.

    Potential benefits

    • Increased citizen trust;
    • Improved customer satisfaction;
    • Improved employee engagement;
    • Lower costs;
    • Improved efficiency; and
    • Better mission focus.

    Risk factors

    • Failure to keep up with rising expectations;
    • Funding IT modernization;
    • Coordination across silos and agencies; and
    • Delays in deployment due to repeated testing.

    Read more about how governments are enhancing customer experience in our Customer experience in government collection.

    Acknowledgments

    The authors would like to thank Neha Malik from the Deloitte Center for Government Insights for driving the research and development of the trend.

    The authors would also like to thank Shruthi K., Diwya Shukla Kumar, and Thirumalai Kannan D. for their research contributions. Also, Angela Welle (Deloitte, US), Tiffany Fishman (Deloitte, US), Yang Chu (Deloitte, US), and Katie Kent (Deloitte, Ireland) for reviews at critical junctures and contributing their ideas and insights to this trend. 

    Cover artist: Traci Daberko

    Endnotes
      1. Tiffany Dovey Fishman, Kristy Hosea, and Amrita Datar, Rx CX: Customer experience as a prescription for improving government performance,” Deloitte Insights, August 24, 2016. View in article

      2. Matt Ross, “The rise and fall of GDS: Lessons for digital government,” Global Government Forum, September 7, 2018. View in article

      3. Government Technology Agency, “Factsheet: Government Technology Agency (GovTech),” accessed May 24, 2019. View in article

      4. Sam Trendall, “Inside the Canadian Digital Service: Why immigration transformation represents its ‘first big opportunity’,” Public Technology.net, August 7, 2018. View in article

      5. European Commission, “Design for innovation,” accessed May 24, 2019; John Chisholm, “An introduction to Horizon 2020 and other EU funds,” Design for Europe, accessed May 24, 2019. View in article

      6. IDEO, “Singapore’s road to a human-centered government,” accessed May 24, 2019. View in article

      7. Emily Middleton, “Chile’s government innovation lab: Citizen-centered design in action,” Government Innovators Network, May 15, 2017. View in article

      8. Tajha Chappellet-Lanier, “VA celebrates early success metrics from the VA.gov relaunch,” Fedscoop, February 19, 2019. View in article

      9. Internal Affairs-New Zealand Government, “Result 10,” December 14, 2015; State Service Commission-New Zealand Government, “Better public services result 10: SmartStart makes it easy for parents,” March 13, 2017. View in article

      10. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, “SmartStart,” October 17, 2016. View in article

      11. Megan Anderson et al., “A lab of labs: Methods and approaches for a human-centered design,” Publishinglab.nl, December 2017; Daniel Baheta and Florian Rabenstein, “Making digital learning accessible for all children in Kenya,” Office of Innovation-UNICEF, November 29, 2018; Eva Köppen, “Three good reasons for turning to design in Germany’s public policy,” This is Design Thinking, accessed May 24, 2019. View in article

      12. Neelima Choahan, “New technology a helping hand for Melbourne's vision impaired,” The Age, October 16, 2017. View in article

      13. U.S. General Services Administration, “FY 2019 Federal Acquisition Service FAS Customer Survey,” March 29, 2019. View in article

      14. Magdalena Kuenkel, “Participatory budgeting – Portuguese style,” Centre for Public Impact," March 22, 2018. View in article

      15. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Public Governance Reviews: Paraguay: Pursuing National Development through Integrated Public Governance (OECD Publishing, 2018); Wendy Tan, Geen Reacties, “Co-creation and co-design for community-linked developments in Copenhagen,” R-Link, January 10, 2019; Frank Mirabal et al., “Albuquerque: Connecting immigrant-entrepreneurs to financial services,” The Public Engagement Roadmap, accessed May 24, 2019. View in article

      16. Erica Volini, Indranil Roy, and Jeff Schwartz, “From employee experience to human experience: Putting meaning back into work,” 2019 Global Human Capital Trends, Deloitte Insights, April 11, 2019. View in article

      17. Jean E. Fox, “Using design thinking to build innovative solutions,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 17, 2018. View in article

      18. Zachary Lerner, “Federal student aid customer experience journey: A recap,” Digital Gov, August 14, 2015; Ben Balter, “The ‘culture of no’ and 3 other government IT challenges,” Nextgov, October 19, 2015; Stephen Easton, “New DHS citizen experience chief: Automation will lead to more ‘human’ services,” The Mandarin, April 5, 2018. View in article

      19. Louise Downe, “6 ways we’re helping to make government services better in 2018,” Government Digital Service, January 25, 2018; UK Government, “Design community,” accessed May 31 2019. View in article

      20. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, “Creating change,” accessed May 24, 2019. View in article

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    Public Sector , Digital Transformation , Government , Customer Service

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    Bruce Chew

    Bruce Chew

    Federal Consulting Managing Director

    Bruce Chew is a managing director with Monitor Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP’s strategy service line. For more than 20 years, his work has focused on strategy development and implementation and the building of organizational capabilities. Chew is a former Harvard Business School professor and has twice served on the advisory board panel for the President’s Federal Customer Service Awards. He has worked with the federal government, universities, and companies across a broad range of industries.

    • brchew@deloitte.com
    • +1 617 437 3526
    Jeneanne Rae

    Jeneanne Rae

    Jeneanne Rae is a specialist executive in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Government and Public Services practice. She has been at the forefront of service innovation and design for more than a decade, working with large corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. Her thought leadership has appeared in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Design Management Journal, and HBR.org. Her current focus is in building CX programs to drive innovation and improve organizational strategies for government agencies to help increase their productivity and reduce cost and program risk. Rae holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.

    • jmrae@deloitte.com
    Jason Manstof

    Jason Manstof

    Principal | Monitor Deloitte

    Jason currently leads Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Government & Public Services (GPS) Strategy & Analytics (S&A) practice, comprised of 2,100+ passionate strategy and analytics practitioners located across the country. GPS S&A collaborates with federal agencies, state and local governments, and higher education institutions to bring integrated strategy, advanced analytics, and cognitive solutions and data assets to bear on clients’ most critical mission challenges. In leading the S&A practice, Jason is actively driving our continued rapid growth, delivering the #1 talent experience to our practice, and fostering a cohesive culture that builds and gives back to our broader communities. A core tenet of the GPS S&A practice, and one of Jason’s personal drivers, is helping clients unlock the value of data and AI to make key strategic choices and transform in the face of unprecedented disruption. His work with executives across the private sector and public sectors has helped improve mission effectiveness through data driven transformations. Recently, Jason was honored to receive the Service to the Citizen AwardTM as Industry Executive of the Year. Jason is a proud University of Florida Gator, having received his BS in Decision and Information Services, followed by an MS in Management of Information Technology from the University of Virginia. He currently lives in Washington, DC.

    • jmanstof@deloitte.com
    • +1 202 431 1569
    Stine Degnegaard

    Stine Degnegaard

    Dr. Stine Degnegaard leads Deloitte Public Sector Innovation in Denmark. She is a global thought leader in cocreation and public innovation design. Dr. Degnegaard holds a PhD from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in collaboration with Stanford University d.school. Her research focuses on designing tools for cocreation, with a special focus on global challenges.

    • sdegnegaard@deloitte.dk

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