CIOs: Want to raise up your citizens’ feelings and engagement with your government agency? And deepen your employee loyalty? Sadly, Forrester survey data shows that the quality of most agencies’ customer experience (CX) is mostly weak and uneven overall.

Key to achieving this success: prioritizing tech-driven innovations to help you proactively address CX issues and challenges. These efforts focus on and leverage emerging technologies such as edge computing, AI/machine learning, augmented reality, blockchain, and more to craft net-new values. And to be most impactful, pursue a portfolio of innovation efforts (see figure below) and develop them with an agile approach, in which you iterate the offerings based on targeted customer feedback to ensure their alignment and validation.

And don’t pursue these innovation efforts on your own. Encourage all employees to participate in your innovation efforts, share the CX insights they have experienced, and craft and collaborate on proposals via an innovation ideation program. And to gain the broadest and most impactful set of ideas, also engage with your technology partners, your CIO peers in other government agencies, and technology specialists in local universities and startups.

Source: “Use Tech-Driven Innovation For Big Gains In Government CX” Forrester report

 

The three types of disruptive innovations:

  • New digital business value. This delivers net-new regulatory, business, life, or financial customer values that are adjacent to your existing agency’s services and offerings, rather than tactical extensions or enhancements to them.
  • Adjacent disruption. Extending your value beyond your agency’s historical value scope helps you expand the value of your existing assets across a broader set of markets with a high-growth, net-new digital customer value.
  • Moonshot. These rare innovations look to transform emerging market scarcities into abundances, delivering 10x value gains and service improvements with radical transformations that often take multiple years to bring to market.

We found that when customer experiences improve:

  • Customers engage, trust, and forgive. As CX improves, more customers will comply with a department’s directives, engage with the department proactively, speak well of it, trust it, and forgive its mistakes.
  • Operations cost less and run more smoothly. Better CX helps government organizations spend less, smooth the rollout of legislation, and avoid scandals.

 

A good example: To encourage engagement from new parents, four agencies in the New Zealand government created SmartStart, a digital portal that integrates official information, services, and benefits for new parents in one place. In a country where 60,000 babies are born each year, more than 65,000 parents used the site during its first four months. The collaborative agencies were:

  • Department of Internal Affairs
  • Ministry of Social Development
  • Inland Revenue Department
  • Ministry of Health

Source: SmartStart

 

For more on this topic and how to best plan these investments, Rick Parrish and I recently published a report entitled “Use Tech-Driven Innovation For Big Gains In Government CX.” Take a look at it and share with us your feedback. If we can help you advance your innovation efforts, we are happy to come do so later this year.

(Written with Emily Stutzman, research associate at Forrester)