Improving CX through data and testing

Peter Drucker's famous quote, "You can't manage what you can't measure," has been a private sector business adage for several decades. 

But it should also be a mantra for government today, as it works to implement President Joe Biden's executive order to improve the public's customer experience through easy-to-use, modern technologies. 

Coming on the one-year anniversary of the order, the implications still remain vast and profound. With America's government agencies facing 9 billion hours of manual paperwork each year and uncounted inefficiencies in its enterprise technologies, citizens need better user experiences. That could strengthen their trust in our democracy and even help achieve the goals of greater equity and inclusion. And it could help stem the exodus of public employees that threatens to immobilize many government agencies.

But one question haunts people who say they will make government work better: how do we get from here to there?

I believe we can greatly improve the American experience with government through technology. But, as in the private sector, success will require the ability of government to measure objectively – and quantitatively – what works and what does not. 

We must gauge the scale and nature of the challenges we're facing before we charge headlong into trying to solve them and risk investing time, effort and public money in the wrong places.

I'll bet that if you ask most people about measuring customer experience, they immediately think of a survey or a focus group. But what if you had objective data about the user experience? An authoritative data source that tells you every single inefficiency, in every single workflow, in every single application? You could make choices based on hard facts, not anecdotes. 

The government could be examining usage data for the platforms and tools it already uses. If a federal worker takes 30 minutes to manage a single transaction on a financial platform, then we need to know that's the baseline to improve upon. Then, after changes and improvements are made—and new platforms tested—more user experience data is gathered and consulted to make sure new solutions are working (and to find out how well). Rinse and repeat.

Doing so can address innovation within procurement channels and enhance government culture for employee retention, a problem that is reaching crisis proportions. For example, while there are now more public sector jobs than before the pandemic, there are 664,000 fewer people employed in the public sector. The Gallup organization reports that 71% of state and local workers are not engaged in their jobs. And another report found that because of lagging employee engagement in the federal government, federal employees were 11% less productive than other employees. 

Another challenge is onboarding. The IRS, for one, will be hiring tens of thousands of new staff over the next eight years as a result of the $80 billion it received from Congress this summer to overhaul the agency. It expects to hire 5,000 people in the next few months alone, just to answer phone calls. Imagine the time saved and productivity improved if the IRS used some of the latest technologies to replace hours of classroom training with virtual assistants that teach employees how to use applications quickly and effectively as they work at their desks.  

My optimism about this order boils down to a sincere hope: in five years' time, we won't look back and see it as just another piece of paper. 

But we need to measure current status before we can improve anything. 

As human beings, we tolerate change when we believe the benefits outweigh the pain, frustration, and effort that change requires. I believe this change will be worth it. But our path must be clear and quantified, as well as bold and ambitious.