The President’s Management Agenda calls for agencies to improve their customer experience. A new report from the Partnership for Public Service features comments from agency leaders who’ve already improved their experience. Meroe Park, executive vice president of the Partnership for Public Service, says that figuring out the path forward is imperative for agencies.
“For agencies that provide services to the public, it is really important for them to understand what is working and what is not working. Data is a great way to help answer that question,” Park said. “In this report, we looked at 8 agencies out of 25 that provide really high impact services to the public, and we used data to help us understand what is happening there and to provide some lessons learned and provide some steps that agencies can take to really improve their customer experience.”
Kathy Conrad, director of digital government at Accenture Federal Services, says that maintaining an easily accessible web presence is an important part of customer experience.
“We found that experience on federal websites is fairly inconsistent. There are some websites like Federal Student Aid, VA, TSA, who have designed their sites around customer wants and needs. Based on research rather than assumptions. Those sites are clear and easy to navigate, Conrad said. “Others have a lot of bureaucratic jargon in them that is making it really hard for people to find what they need. And then there are still other services like passports that you can’t actually fully complete online.”
