The Path to Improved Citizen Digital Experiences

Customer experience is critical to any industry, but for government agencies, citizens’ ability to engage with you could make the difference in getting the services citizens need to pay bills, buy food or receive long-term medical care. 

Being able to quickly and easily navigate agency websites and apps can strengthen the relationship between citizens and government because let’s face it: Citizens expect applications to work as seamlessly as the apps from their favorite coffee brand or banking institution. 

When citizens can count on a smooth transaction or easily finding the information they need, constituents see the government as a provider rather than a vast bureaucracy—whereas a rocky digital experience can lead to frustration, toil and ultimately complaints to government decision-makers. A recent Deloitte article reinforced this theory by listing increased citizen trust as a benefit of treating citizens like customers.

The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act emphasizes meeting these growing customer expectations by making agency websites and digital services more responsive to user needs and tasks, more consistent in appearance, searchable and mobile-friendly. 

While these tasks are all notable, ensuring responsiveness to citizen needs is much easier said than done as modern software is extremely complex. While IT teams now have the data they need to improve citizen experiences, it is often distributed and difficult to analyze. The ability to quickly find, visualize and understand data–in real time–is essential for immediate action and the types of citizen experiences envisioned in the 21st Century IDEA. 

Take a service-disabled veteran-owned small business, for example. To acquire that status, an owner needs to use the Small Business Administration’s website to register and renew the certification. If he or she has trouble finding or accessing information, they might decide against being part of the program. The result will not only affect the business owner but also decrease the number of service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses competing for government contracts. This is a double loss for the government and the business-owner customer.

Capturing a holistic view of the digital customer experience is a challenge. The entire end-user experience depends on the full technology stack—from cloud or on-premises infrastructure to application to the browsers that ultimately render the application. Technology teams need the ability to identify, diagnose and resolve issues quickly across all backend and frontend services, or else citizens will be prevented citizens from doing important services online due to poor experiences.

Measurement of digital efforts (e.g., initiatives spurred by the 21st Century IDEA) is critical to creating meaningful improvements for the citizen digital experience and monitoring progress and gaps through the journey. It’s likely technology leaders may soon be asked to report on 21st Century IDEA efforts on Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act scorecards and they will need cohesive data to show accountability and results. 

The private sector is already leveraging these kinds of innovative data snapshots. In fact, they’ve seen incredible success from even small tweaks based on insights they garnered from deep data analysis and observability.

For example, at Staples, a one-second improvement in page-load times yielded a 10% boost in conversions. Walmart found that every 100-millisecond improvement in transaction speed led to a 1% improvement in revenue. And Fanatics, a seller of licensed sports merchandise, doubled its mobile conversions after cutting page-load times by two seconds.

To make these kinds of strides, agencies need to focus on their customers—citizens—and understand what matters to them and how to give them the best possible experience. This is done by using data to identify the typical customer journey and understanding how your website is being utilized. 

Data allows agencies to anticipate problems, preventing them before they impact the citizen. This used to be possible through basic monitoring of applications and hosts but today spans a range of diverse and interdependent elements. By utilizing a holistic system overview designed to analyze the health of complex modern technology infrastructure in a clear and concise way, IT teams can better optimize sites for citizens.

All of this information can still be useless if it’s not put into context—technology professionals are already suffering from alarmingly high signal-to-noise ratios. So how do reams of data turn into usable insights? By deploying an observability platform that monitors, processes, categorizes and sorts data, then presents it in a meaningful, visual, actionable platform. 

There are a few places to start to make the most significant impact. Agencies need to pay attention to real-time front-end performance visibility since that’s where about 85% of response time occurs. By doing this, they can discover coding errors that have a direct impact on citizens’ experiences and are able to make the transactions they need.

Beyond that, tools such as health maps that chart the stability of the site are essential in monitoring customer satisfaction. A single, comprehensive view across applications gives agency IT teams the ability to spot and track down problems as they occur, in real time.

The citizen experience is an important part of the federal government’s duty in ensuring seamless and frictionless transactions. Complying with the 21st Century IDEA is important, but doing it in a meaningful way can only be accomplished by cutting through the complexity of modern architectures and turning endless data into clear answers.

Customer experience is critical to any industry, but for government agencies, citizens’ ability to engage with you could make the difference in getting the services citizens need to pay bills, buy food or even receive long-term medical care. 

Being able to quickly and easily navigate agency websites and apps can strengthen the relationship between citizens and government because let’s face it: Citizens expect applications to work as seamlessly as the apps from their favorite coffee brand or banking institution. 

When citizens can count on a smooth transaction or easily finding the information they need, constituents see the government as a provider rather than a vast bureaucracy—whereas a rocky digital experience can lead to frustration, toil and ultimately complaints to government decision-makers. A recent Deloitte article reinforced this theory by listing increased citizen trust as a benefit of treating citizens like customers.

The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act emphasizes meeting these growing customer expectations by making agency websites and digital services more responsive to user needs and tasks, more consistent in appearance, searchable and mobile-friendly. 

While these tasks are all notable, ensuring responsiveness to citizen needs is much easier said than done as modern software is extremely complex. While IT teams now have the data they need to improve citizen experiences, it is often distributed and difficult to analyze. The ability to quickly find, visualize and understand data–in real time–is essential for immediate action and the types of citizen experiences envisioned in the 21st Century IDEA. 

Take a service-disabled veteran-owned small business, for example. To acquire that status, an owner needs to use the Small Business Administration’s website to register and renew the certification. If he or she has trouble finding or accessing information, they might decide against being part of the program. The result will not only affect the business owner but also decrease the number of service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses competing for government contracts. This is a double loss for the government and the business-owner customer.

Capturing a holistic view of the digital customer experience is a challenge. The entire end-user experience depends on the full technology stack—from cloud or on-premises infrastructure to application to the browsers that ultimately render the application. Technology teams need the ability to identify, diagnose and resolve issues quickly across all backend and frontend services, or else citizens will be prevented citizens from doing important services online due to poor experiences.

Measurement of digital efforts (e.g., initiatives spurred by the 21st Century IDEA) is critical to creating meaningful improvements for the citizen digital experience and monitoring progress and gaps through the journey. It’s likely technology leaders may soon be asked to report on IDEA efforts on Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act score cards and they will need cohesive data to show accountability and results. 

The private sector is already leveraging these kinds of innovative data snapshots. In fact, they’ve seen incredible success from even small tweaks based on insights they garnered from deep data analysis and observability.

For example, at Staples, a one-second improvement in page-load times yielded a 10% boost in conversions. Walmart found that every 100-millisecond improvement in transaction speed led to a 1% improvement in revenue. And Fanatics, a seller of licensed sports merchandise, doubled its mobile conversions after cutting page-load times by two seconds.

To make these kinds of strides, agencies need to focus on their customers—citizens—and understand what matters to them and how to give them the best possible experience. This is done by using data to identify the typical customer journey and understanding how your website is being utilized. 

Data allows agencies to anticipate problems, preventing them before they impact the citizen. This used to be possible through basic monitoring of applications and hosts but today spans a range of diverse and interdependent elements. By utilizing a holistic system overview designed to analyze the health of complex modern technology infrastructure in a clear and concise way, IT teams can better optimize sites for citizens.

All of this information can still be useless if it’s not put into context—technology professionals are already suffering from alarmingly high signal-to-noise ratios. So how do reams of data turn into usable insights? By deploying an observability platform that monitors, processes, categorizes and sorts data, then presents it in a meaningful, visual, actionable platform. 

There are a few places to start to make the most significant impact. Agencies need to pay attention to real-time front-end performance visibility since that’s where about 85% of response time occurs. By doing this, they can discover coding errors that have a direct impact on citizens’ experiences and are able to make the transactions they need.

Beyond that, tools such as health maps that chart the stability of the site are essential in monitoring customer satisfaction. A single, comprehensive view across applications gives agency IT teams the ability to spot and track down problems as they occur, in real time.

The citizen experience is an important part of the federal government’s duty in ensuring seamless and frictionless transactions. Complying with the 21st Century IDEA is important, but doing it in a meaningful way can only be accomplished by cutting through the complexity of modern architectures and turning endless data into clear answers.

Bob Withers is senior director of public sector at New Relic.