If you live in the United States, you’ve likely heard someone complain or make a joke about the frustrating experience of renewing a driver’s license, registering a new business, or engaging in some other interaction with a local, state, or federal agency.
Often, these agencies are underfunded and understaffed. Historically, public sector service providers were slower than many for-profit businesses to transform (or even digitize) analog processes. Governments faced numerous obstacles: unwieldy legacy systems, deeply entrenched (and regulated) bureaucracies that reinforce disconnected silos, and the lack of the drive to innovate that is inherent in commercial competitive markets.
But all that is rapidly changing. Those cultural clichés about inadequate public service delivery are becoming antiquated as more government agencies adopt and implement best practices for designing and delivering services.
In the U.S., consumer-oriented businesses pioneered these best practices. In B2C marketplaces, the brutal reality that customers have abundant choices for most goods and services fuels customer experience and service design innovation; customers vote with their money. In a globalized, commoditized, and increasingly digital economy, businesses must differentiate based on the quality of the customer experiences they enable. In this context, the best experiences are the ones that are the most relevant. Businesses must fully understand their customers’ journeys in specific, meaningful contexts to align their business processes to deliver services according to customers’ expectations.
Government agencies don’t compete in the same sense since public constituents don’t often have freedom of choice. However, agencies have embraced service design principles, strategies, and tactics for significant reasons. Agencies can bolster their mission effectiveness by managing end-user and employee experiences and improving service delivery. When governments deliver services in alignment with how real people think, feel, and behave, end-users accomplish their objectives more quickly, with fewer errors, and require less support. End users become not just more satisfied; they become more efficient (cheaper to service), and they become more trusting of government agencies and more likely to continue to stay engaged (which may generate follow-on efficiencies, like when residents renew their licenses on time or keep their records up-to-date).
When agencies can increase their mission effectiveness, they can serve more constituents at a lower service cost. The government performs better, communities function better, and residents live better. To succeed at these interconnected goals, agencies have embraced the mindset, processes, and language associated with customer experience (CX).
The United States federal government formally advances this agenda by directing high-impact service providers in the public sector to apply government-wide guiding principles to improve the customer experience. The official instructions for preparing, submitting, and executing the federal budget include a detailed action plan for managing customer experience and improving service delivery. The Office of Management and Budget, the largest office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, manages this agenda (OMB Circulars No. A—11 and No. M-23-22: Delivering a Digital-first Public Experience) addressed to all heads of executive departments in the federal government. More tactically, the federal website digital.gov provides a deep library of resources in service of The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, a bipartisan act signed into law by the U.S. Congress in December 2018.
Following suit, state government leaders prioritize improving customer experiences and service delivery. Every year, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers compiles a list of the top 10 priorities. In 2024, digital government/digital services (for “improving and digitizing citizen experience”) ranked first—tied with cybersecurity—while AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation ranked third.
Furthermore, some states are mandating approaches similar to the federal guidance. Governor Josh Shapiro enacted the Commonwealth Office of Digital Experience in Pennsylvania to “improve, streamline, and continuously adapt the Commonwealth’s digital services so that interactions between users and Commonwealth entities are simple, seamless, and secure.”
The focus is not just on new technology but on how agencies best engage with their constituents, and that’s a critical point.
Focusing on improving customer experiences and service delivery by privileging customer journeys makes reframing traditional notions of systems-level problems and solutions easier. Historically, government (and business) leaders have inverted their priorities, investing in technological solutions over understanding people-centered problems. Most organizations have invested in information technology first in ways that forced natural operational processes and employee and customer behaviors to adapt to fit the capabilities of their software and hardware.
Yes, we need powerful information technology to automate and scale processes. However, technology should always serve, not subvert, the contextually relevant ways workers and customers want to accomplish their goals, objectives, and tasks. When speaking at the Digital Government Excellence Symposium, North Carolina Secretary of Information Technology and CIO Jim Weaver said, “When we talk about streamlining governmental processes, it’s not a technology problem. Folks, it’s a human bureaucratic problem that stymies us.”
Today, these human bureaucratic problems, such as siloed thinking, make it easy to be mesmerized by new digital applications. It’s still too easy to focus on technology tools that might treat symptoms but fail to solve real problems. Consider an example where a state agency wants to reduce operational costs by deflecting users from a telephone contact center to an AI-powered chatbot. The cost of the new chatbot seems warranted if it will lower the cost of operating the contact center. This analysis ignores a more fundamental customer-centered question: why are people calling the contact center in the first place? If we can truly understand how to deliver services without friction and the need for any support, we can reduce or eliminate the need for the chatbot and the contact center. Solving the underlying problem achieves greater mission effectiveness, reduces costs, frees up resources, and builds trust (and makes people happier).
The process must start with real people and their needs at every touchpoint in their journey at a level of fidelity more comprehensive than the entry and exit points of your current business processes. When you do this, you stop thinking of service delivery strategies as outputs and begin to look at them as outcomes. Don’t begin the digital transformation or delivery improvement process with We need a new portal. Instead, dive into understanding the objectives of a specific community of constituents. What are they trying to accomplish within the actual context of their lives? Elicit unarticulated problems and surface latent needs.
Service design requires leveraging the most meaningful data to be successful. Most public sector agencies (like most businesses) utilize some form of customer satisfaction metrics, and funding for some government services requires agencies to meet specific customer satisfaction benchmarks. While these traditional approaches yield certain helpful information, they are less useful than most professionals are willing to admit; customer satisfaction metrics are merely evaluative dashboard indicators of whether we have failures or successes.
Are you happy with your experience? Would you recommend this service to a friend? These questions can tell you whether or not you have a problem. If your answers are consistently low, you know you have a problem. Or worse, multiple problems. But what is the problem? Those questions don’t get you any closer to identifying or fixing it. Similarly, if scores are high, something is working, but what? Do you know what it is so that you can ensure you keep it up?
Innovation in service delivery and continuous improvement cycles require generative data that precisely define what aspect of the service is working, what’s broken, why, and more importantly, what and where are the opportunities to reframe and reimagine the status quo. Generative data comes from getting inside the situation and collaborating with the real people who use and deliver the service, not from surveys. Service designers are skilled at collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing this data.
The service design approach requires an intentional innovation mindset because delivering a connected constituent experience requires a connected organizational (or even inter-organizational) framework. Most teams can look to their agency’s higher purpose, vision, and mission statements to animate their efforts. People who work in the public sector take immense, well-deserved pride in their duty to serve their constituents, many of whom are vulnerable or dependent.
However, agency employees often become overwhelmed when facing the complex challenge of revamping services. It’s human nature to get stressed in the face of change and new initiatives. Don’t try to accomplish everything at once. Identify the most important areas of focus for your success and begin there. Every small project or initiative will compound itself into more significant results.
