Improving customer experience in government

As everyone who lived through it saw clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic was an enormous stressor on almost everything — from the government to the economy to our daily lives. People expected the government to deliver a coherent, consolidated response. But that couldn’t happen without a data-collection methodology that allowed the proper agencies to make informed and timely decisions.

When dealing with a new, rapidly spreading disease, decisions have to be made across multiple organizations, whether they’re about medical staffing at hospitals or larger federal issues like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) COVID-19 Response and Recovery efforts, which includes protecting public health, allocating funding, building infrastructure, and communicating policies and guidance. Historic data and preplanned responses informed a lot of the early decision-making but failed to push the necessary action the moment demanded. Most notably, a widespread national effort to address the crisis never took hold.

In addition to a lack of collaboration, the federal government and larger agencies involved in the early days of the pandemic had glaring flaws in their methods for collecting data about infection rates. Officials underused digital tools, and as a result, data wasn’t always gathered under a singular process, which led to challenges when trying to clarify and analyze the information received. Overall, the response reflected a failure to address the urgency of many communities’ needs and reinforced a negative and harmful stereotype about the government’s ability to deliver good outcomes.

The response highlighted the dire consequences of using siloed systems to coordinate a national emergency response. Furthermore, it underscored that larger bureaucratic bodies have much more work to do to earn back their constituents’ trust.

Though it may seem odd to refer to this as a “customer experience” failure, it’s a fairly apt description. In fact, the code of ethics developed for U.S. public health institutions and referenced in the Centers for Disease Control’s Pledge to the American People specifically calls out the need for robust, collaborative systems to serve the public.

While national efforts struggled, some local governments found success through a digital-first approach that succeeded in both rural and metropolitan areas. Whereas larger federal bodies had to wade through seas of red tape and attempt to manage massive interdepartmental communications, these smaller organizations benefited from mobile-friendly data collection methods, enabling real-time feedback from their communities to inform their response.

In the rural area of Park County, Montana, for example, local officials had largely relied on paper and analog methods to interact with their constituents and implement policy. But when COVID-19 demanded a more agile and immediate government response, the county acted quickly to digitize as many of its processes as possible.

Using the right tools and systems, Park County was able to transform its data collection processes in just a week, gaining access to easily generated digital forms and editable PDFs that helped gather real-time, on-the-ground information and transfer it to a central source. As a result, the county could work directly off of citizens’ input using submissions to digital contact- tracing forms to assess and respond to their needs.

In another instance, Marin County in California found similar success with data collection. The county had been using a digital citizen information collection process before the pandemic, but the platform it used was complex and required training to navigate, slowing down the rest of the operation as a result.

When Marin County revitalized its digital system, staff turned to Jotform Enterprise, which provided them with a no-code solution for rapid digital form creation and automated workflows. These transformative elements helped internal departments train employees, transition to digital formats, and scale quickly with ease. More importantly, it quickly turned local information from residents into a clear picture of how the disease was spreading and where local officials could take action.

Both of these stories show the power of digital transformation to effect governmental change in quick, precise ways, no matter where people are in the U.S. As Marin County found after implementing Jotform Enterprise, interconnected and well-designed systems empower agencies and their employees to work better while giving them the ability to bolster customer relationships — so much so that the county has since expanded its use of the platform to the county Assessor and Recorder’s office.

Though federal agencies are more complex, the technology used to revitalize their customer experiences doesn’t have to be. In fact, as these local examples prove, the best systems are those that use a simple interface and automated tools to empower employees to make better-informed and strategic decisions.

What happens when people who work for the public sector, set on serving their fellow constituents and improving the processes within government, aren’t able to accomplish that very function?

In the midst of technical mismanagement and frustration on all sides, it’s important to understand the source of these issues. Numerous large-scale federal agencies are hamstrung by bad systems and poor communication with one another.

Well-known backlog and management issues plague services like the IRS and the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which lead to much of the negative sentiment about these departments. But despite these infamously fraught relationships, the problems endemic in the Veterans Affairs (VA) office may top them all. From old-school collection methods to the management and application of data to solve pressing issues, the VA is too hit-or-miss to be effective. There have been some improvements since the start of the pandemic, but reports still show first-time claims for benefits are commonly backlogged for four months or more on average.

A core issue for the VA is how data that’s already collected actually moves through the system and becomes actionable. Information for critical veterans’ insurance claims gets entered fairly quickly but then gets stuck in processing for months (or years). The ultimate frustration is that while the VA has this information, it lacks the means to effectively use it to provide better service.

The result is a bad CX caused by long wait times and ineffective service. This failure has a tragic history, as revealed by a whistleblower report in 2015 detailing delays in providing critical care, deleted applications for benefits, and misuse of funds. And while in the private sector this kind of CX failure would prompt customers to look to other competitors for better business, the VA is an essential, singular government service. The bad press from events like this trickle down to a larger distrust of bureaucratic data management, reinforcing the distrust that exists across agencies.

The scariest word a data security analyst can hear is “breach.” A pressing privacy and security issue that affects government agencies large and small, these lapses in protection can allow bad actors to tap into massive amounts of government and personal data to use (or, more likely, sell) at their whim. No matter the size or scale of the breach, the resulting public sentiment is always a mixture of fear and frustration.

For local governments, the culprits in many of these breaches are poorly implemented, third-party data-collection systems. Many smaller divisions and agencies use external systems that can affordably handle and support different parts of their operations. In balancing cost and effectiveness, many end up piecemealing a backend system to help deliver on the numerous government services their citizens expect — but in doing so, aren’t always guaranteed the necessary level of security.

In 2018, a breach in Wellington, Florida, resulted from a failure to contain and monitor information within the government’s billing vendor, Click2Gov. Lax cybersecurity and disparate uses of data across platforms within the department, each with different types of security, opened the door to the breach. This system was intended to harbor several government departments’ citizen data, but because the various tools the agencies were using weren’t designed to integrate, security suffered.

Click2Gov quickly became infamous when similar breaches popped up in Oklahoma City and Midland, Texas, both smaller communities that tend to have more solid relationships with their local governments. But in the aftermath of these breaches, constituents understandably questioned their faith in the process and how much they could continue to trust these customer experiences. Rifts like these between government and citizens are some of the most difficult to repair, requiring targeted efforts and investments on the part of agencies to regain their standing.

Many citizens would like to think that no price is too high to pay to maintain data privacy — especially when it’s their data in question. But the right solution isn’t as much about throwing money at the problem as it is being more strategic and thoughtful in the implementation. This includes a careful process of choosing the right vendors and finding the platform with the strength and flexibility in infrastructure that can build a bridge from legacy systems to a more efficient, digitized future.

Above all else, government agencies need to take a comprehensive approach to data collection, which entails collecting, maintaining, and protecting data within a cohesive system. In particular, agencies should exclusively work with platforms that are SOC 2 compliant, the gold standard of data management in terms of privacy and integrity of the information. Government IT employees would likely appreciate this kind of technology, as it better guarantees interconnected security, which ensures no glaring, breachable gaps in data collection and management.

Another important aspect of securing the privacy of citizen data is limiting access. The platforms these agencies use should implement protections for accessibility like single sign-on (SSO) and payment card industry (PCI) certification for payment processing, both of which are standard but stalwart protection measures for common functions. These tools aren’t necessarily expensive or reserved for the most secure data sets — any organization can access and implement these safeguards against the most common types of breaches.

Additionally, governments and communities need to fully comply with all regulations across industries and use cases. From the aforementioned GDPR to HIPAA and other regulations, data compliance is a serious subject that needs to be incorporated into any agency’s security and privacy strategy. The ideal system has the flexibility to adjust to evolving global and industry regulations, helping organizations avoid data breaches, trust issues, and hefty fines. Compliance is essential to ensuring a safe, reliable customer experience.

A lot of common and necessary interactions with government agencies are already unpleasant. Paying fines, submitting claims, and other stress-inducing processes are inherently contentious, even as agencies take steps to make them easier. Digitization and the push for more online submissions have already helped alleviate many issues, but addressing other areas of opportunity could enhance the overall experience.

As digital transformation continues at state-level governments, one example of improvement has been to allow citizens to pay tickets online. The process itself is far easier than mailing or phone procedures, enabling users to immediately address a violation.

However, when the system in place isn’t set up for easy payment or there are flaws in integrating payment processors, that user’s kernel of frustration at receiving a ticket can morph into a deep distrust of digital processes. But strong customer experiences and straightforward payment options make these cumbersome processes easier to navigate.

Tax filing is another area where the digital customer experience has plenty of improvement potential. Currently, data collection is tricky because of analog or digital methods that include numerous phases and forms to fill out. At the same time, an overwhelmed IRS often struggles to manage and act on the data, leaving employees unable to carry out the necessary tasks to serve their customers effectively.

Tax season produces an enormous amount of anxiety and requires a long journey through multiple forms before those filing can reach the final payment processing phase. To cap it off, the payment completion process — the culmination of the CX itself — has historically been a difficult touchpoint that has caused controversy among customers.

Though digital tax filing has become more common and helped people file more easily, those who still file using paper forms (about 8.2 million people a year) have seen enormous payment processing issues and ongoing delays in receiving refunds.

These are clear areas of opportunity for government services to improve secure payments through better processes and broader acceptance of consumers’ preferred methods of payment. By default, this would make the more burdensome (but necessary) aspects of interacting with the government much easier, no matter the use case.

Government agencies and organizations need to build processes with CX in mind, first and foremost. This ethos was the main thrust of the Biden administration’s recent executive order, but it remains one of the biggest areas of improvement in the ongoing process of digital transformation. Even if data collection and management are effective and security is solid, a clunky online user experience will still leave a customer frustrated.

To combat these issues, agencies need to build customer-facing tools designed to eliminate the roadblocks users face. Helpful integrations include forms with built-in payment tools to accept payments within a form, creating a complete end-to-end experience on one platform. These kinds of integrations give users an easier path to complete tasks and get those aggravating payments out of the way as fast as they can.

As a rule, external apps should make things easier, not further complicate the experience for both the agency and the constituent. Agencies should aim to keep the customer journey as streamlined as possible. Too often, users get lost in a process because the tools they’re using don’t fit an archaic backend architecture — something that a flexible application programming interface (API) could solve easily. Similarly, governments can take advantage of tools that make it easy to quickly digitize existing paper forms, like an integration that streamlines document collection and management down the line and improves the quality of the CX.