It takes a village to deliver a great customer experience. Today’s release of The ForeSee E-Government Satisfaction Index (Q4 2014)–available for download here–highlights the importance of consistency in customer service for government agencies and outlines steps government customer experience professionals can take to achieve customer experience excellence with today’s multichannel, multi-device citizens. The report also reveals citizen satisfaction scores for 100 federal department, agency and  program websites and the latest ForeSee Mobile Federal Government Benchmark. Download the report here.

For years we’ve been saying that citizens prefer to get government information via digital channels. Availability and consistency of data—and now access from any device—are expectations citizens have of agency leaders. Citizens don’t see federal government departments, agencies and programs as the “web team,” the “contact center team” or the “office of communications.” Rather, they see you as the Social Security Administration, the Department of Education or the Office of Personnel Management, and they don’t care about the internal challenges you may face. So what can you do to ensure your department or agency’s customer experience efforts are successful?

Recently, I had the opportunity  to share some best practices  with leadership  at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), that can be rolled out at any department, agency or program. In The ForeSee E-Government Satisfaction Index (Q4 2014), we’ve included an abbreviated list of what was discussed. I encourage you to download the full report to learn more, but I wanted to point out what we feel is a crucial step in achieving customer experience excellence: measurement.

The ForeSee E-Government Satisfaction Index (Q4 2014) measures satisfaction with federal websites using our proven methodology that is credible, reliable, accurate, precise and predictive of future behaviors, and that delivers the answer to the question, what do we do to improve?

Measuring satisfaction matters, because if agencies can deliver a satisfactory experience, the likelihood of desired outcomes increases. For example, for this quarter’s index, highly satisfied website visitors were 83% more likely to use the website as a primary resource (versus a more costly channel like the contact center) and 80% more likely to put their trust behind the agency. For mobile, those who were highly satisfied with their experience were 85% more likely to return to the site or app and a whopping 118% more likely to recommend the site or app!

Achieving customer experience excellence is not a private-sector or public-sector  thing. It starts when company or agency leaders accept that customers are multichannel and multi-device, and that they expect a consistent experiences across channels. This can be a challenge in federal government, where guidelines are issued through executive orders, with the Office of Management and Budget rolling out cross-agency priority goals. But, like I said, it “takes a village” to deliver a great customer experience, and your efforts become much more unified when you measure that experience consistently.

Download the complete ForeSee E-Government Satisfaction Index (Q4 2014) for more great insights on achieving customer experience excellence in digital government.

About the Author

Dave Lewan is responsible for managing the organization focused on the public sector, including federal and state government departments and agencies, non-profit organizations, associations and higher education institutions. He is charged with defining strategy and leveraging internal resources to initiate new business opportunities while delivering to existing ForeSee public-sector clients. Dave is also responsible for ForeSee’s growing Canadian business including public and private sectors. In 2016, Dave will serve as ForeSee liaison with the Partnership for Public Service for the Center for Presidential Transition, in an effort to educate some 4,000 appointees who will enter into the federal government from the private sector as part of the new administration. Prior to joining ForeSee in 2009, Dave led in key strategic areas at ADP, SalesLogix, Ultimate Software and Ceridian. Dave graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in speech communications.

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