At Your Service: How Agencies Can Leverage Technology to Improve the Citizen Experience

In the commercial sector, customer satisfaction is one of the most valuable assets a company has. It’s no longer enough to simply rely on a great product — top brands like Amazon and Apple, for instance, have remained competitive because they offer continued value to their customers, whether that be by responding quickly to online requests or guaranteeing same-day delivery to customers. In fact, according to one 2020 report, 90% of Americans use customer service as a key factor in deciding whether to do business with a company. Many industry leaders have taken note of this, with 77% of CEOs saying in a recent report from Accenture that their company will fundamentally change the way it engages with customers in a bid to improve growth, durability and relevance.

However, if customer experience is the gold standard for commercial success, why doesn’t the same measure apply to the public sector? If it’s so easy to order furniture overnight or reach a customer service representative to inquire about a recent technology purchase, shouldn’t it be as easy to enroll in Medicare or file for unemployment? 

These are the questions that Terrianne Lord thinks about often. In her role as Salesforce practice lead for Accenture Federal Services, Lord helps agencies solve complex technology problems in order to achieve their missions. That also means leveraging tools and technology to enhance the citizen experience. 

“From a citizen engagement perspective, a lot of the challenges include technology being able to serve the customers in a certain timeframe, being able to consolidate information across so that there's one voice, one vision, one mission,” she says. 

The Problem with Citizen Services Today 

When it comes to digital transformation in government, one of the biggest challenges is breaking through silos that have existed within agencies for years — if not decades. Today, these hurdles are not just frustrating for agency staff, they are also making it difficult to effectively serve constituents. According to Lord, that problem could be solved if government leaders more effectively prioritized customer experience across their agency. 

“Typically, you're familiar with chief customer experience officers, where there's just one part of the business that's focused on interfacing or interacting with customers and driving an enhanced customer experience,” she says. “One of the things that [we] saw is that there was this gap between taking that and expanding it across the entire organization.”

This very challenge was the driving force behind “The Business of Experience,” a partnership between Accenture and Salesforce that aims to help organizations drive meaningful outcomes by prioritizing the citizen experience across the entire enterprise. 

“[This partnership] helps us to drive that mission, helps take it into the C-suite in order to help expand that across the organizations and in the federal government. So now it's more of an experience for customers and employees and across the board versus just siloed in one particular organization,” Lord explains. 

Achieving a More Sustainable Government 

Part of putting the constituent first, Lord explains, is understanding what’s important to them. Today’s citizens are increasingly concerned about the environmental impacts of today’s businesses. In an effort to ensure responsible participation in a capitalist society, small and large businesses alike have introduced corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, which tackle everything from reducing their carbon footprint to introducing environmentally-conscious investing practices. 

“One of the things that we observed is that there is an increased demand from consumers for sustainability in the brands that they do business with. As a result, we saw our partners wanting to embed that type of sustainability into their business and create a new source of value,” Lord says.

Now, government agencies have an opportunity to take a page from the private sector and implement sustainability into their own business practices. Lord has some recommendations for how to get started. 

“The federal government manages over 350,000 buildings and over 600,000 vehicles, so sustainability may look like more fuel-efficient vehicles or reduction in lighting or more enhanced lighting fixtures in order to reduce the consumption of electricity,” she says. “The federal government is one of the largest energy consumers in the nation. So reducing the building energy per square foot, reducing portable water per square foot, shifting to renewable energies are just some of the different ways that the federal government can reduce their carbon footprint.” 

That’s a tall order, which is why Accenture and Salesforce have teamed up to help organizations put these sustainability initiatives front and center by providing government leaders with access to historical and real-time environmental, social and governance (ESG) data. As a result, public sector organizations will be able to more effectively track, measure and act on a range of sustainability initiatives, such as reporting on carbon usage or meeting regulatory requirements. 

Much of the technology necessary to drive sustainability across the federal government is already available — now, agencies just need to tap into it. 

“It’s all about leveraging some of the tools that are already out there to help drive that innovation, drive the need for sustainability, as well as showing marked improvement for both employees and the citizens they serve,” Lord says. 

Learn more about how agencies can enhance the citizen experience at the Salesforce Public Sector Transformation Summit. Sign up at https://publicsectorsummit.com/register.