What CX Should Mean For Government Leaders
To succeed in today’s federal government, leaders need to view the world by how their decisions impact the experience of the people and organizations they touch daily. These are your employees, your constituents, and your customers, and their experience is crucial to your ability to achieve mission goals.
While customer experience (CX) is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, Forrester has found that it doesn’t tell the whole story. Traditional CX focuses on external customers while ignoring employees, partners, and others that are still important to your success. In an increasingly complex, high-pressure federal world, this is even more important.
We’ve expanded the definition of CX to encompass all the people that your organization touches. At Forrester, we call this approach “CX4Gov,” and it’s designed to guide you out of the “hurry up and wait” malaise by harmonizing requirements across your organization and increasing project success.
CX4Gov starts with a simple premise: Put people, and their experiences, first. Regardless of your agency’s mission, it’s people (your employees) that get things done and people (your customers) that you serve. Everything else is ends to a mean. So why not start there? While the premise is simple, the results are astounding. Utilizing CX4Gov:
- Stabilizes your organization. While technology is constantly innovating and political whims can change in a news cycle, the needs of your employees and customers are comparatively steady. Employees want to be empowered to do their job in the best way possible, while your customers want an experience that’s easy and positive. CX4Gov uses this surety as a guiding light to help guide your agency through the treacherous waters of your everyday.
- Creates a culture of collaboration. The culture of an organization impacts its every aspect. The start-and-stop nature of federal bureaucracy can erode otherwise strong culture by sapping moral. CX4Gov creates a rallying cry that your workforce can gather around and align. People want to please, and CX4Gov aligns this desire with your agency’s goals to create a clear vision that your employees will be drawn to, internalize, and spread to their coworkers.
- Improves employee retention. Due to the unique pressures of government employment and the need for the best talent, employee experience is even more important in the public sector than in the private. High pressure, long hours, and thankless work can whittle away at even the most committed public servants. CX4Gov combats this by making their experience a key aspect of your organizational decision-making process. This takes employee motivation off of the poster and into their day-to-day, empowering them to get more done and bring their passion into their work.
- Embraces Agile design and DevOps. Agile design requires input from across the organization; getting that many people to sing from the same sheet of music, however, can feel like a marathon rather than a sprint. Even when it comes to a 1:1 DevOps situation where the IT department is building a solution to an existing challenge, it can be difficult to find a common set of criteria. How can you fail or succeed quickly when no one can agree on what that looks like? CX4Gov creates a common language that transcends organizational silos by rooting goals and success criteria in the impact on the people you’re trying to serve.
Will CX4Gov end “hurry up and wait”? Of course not. But it will help your agency navigate its way through by shedding projects that are destined to fail and giving you an organizational North Star to set your organization by.
Not sure how to start? A 30-minute call with one of our analysts can help you better understand how to start your agency’s CX4Gov conversation or ways you can improve existing efforts.