Federal Agency Customer Experience Act: Key Insights & Impacts

Implementing government legislation can be challenging, but the Federal Agency Customer Service Act presents opportunities for your agency to improve how it serves its citizens.

In this article, we explore the act to help you understand its components and how to use it to reshape your agency’s services and improve public satisfaction through better customer experience standards.

Since government tools do not fulfill all your public customer service needs, you can use third-party tools like Qminder.

With Qminder, you can optimize customer queues to reduce the wait time by half or personalize customer interactions by sending them real-time notifications and reminders to boost satisfaction.

Book a free demo today or sign up for a free trial to discover how Qminder can help your agency serve its customers better.

What is the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act?

The Federal Agency Customer Experience Act is legislation to streamline and enhance the customer experience that federal agencies provide to American citizens in person, over the phone, or online.

The aim is to transform how the government serves its people by delivering simple, secure, seamless, and harmonized customer experiences.

These services need to be at par with or even better than leading customer experiences in the private sector.

To achieve government-wide customer experience efforts, the act identifies 38 of the country’s highest-impact service providers (HISPs) with critical public-facing services. Such providers include:

• Census Bureau
• Federal Student Aid
• Bureau of Consular Affairs
• Customs and Border Protection
• Administration for Children and Families
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
• Department of Housing and Urban Development

Let’s discuss the key components of the act below to explain further what it is about:

Key Components of the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act

The Federal Agency Customer Experience Act has the following major components:

1. Executive Order 14058

Signed by President Joe Biden in Dec 2021, the Executive Order on CX (EO 14508) seeks to transform federal customer service experience and service delivery to rebuild trust in the government.

The order has elements such as:

• A Directive for a Whole-of-Government Approach to Managing Customer Experience: This directive includes commitments by specific agencies to improve services. The approach also provides for developing a new CX framework called Life Experiences. The framework addresses the pain points people encounter at crucial moments in their lives when they need government services or the government to work.

• Navigable Services: The federal government must design, develop, and deliver easy-to-navigate services to people of all abilities.

• Definitions of Key Terms: For example, the order defines a customer as any business, individual, or organization that interacts with a program or agency. The interaction can be direct or indirect, and it can occur through a program funded federally and administered by a nonprofit, contractor, or other federal entity.

• The Actions of Specific Agencies: For example, the Secretary of State is to design and deliver a new experience in renewing passports online without customers needing to mail any physical documents.

• Responsibilities of Various Federal and State Government Stakeholders: For example, the Deputy Director for Management of OMB needs to collaborate with other stakeholders to prioritize customer life experiences.

2. The President’s Management Agenda (PMA)

The PMA Priority 2 aims to deliver equitable, secure, and excellent federal services and customer experience.

To achieve this, the PMA seeks to prioritize the following strategies:

• Improve high-impact federal services through reduced customer burden, streamlined processes, and corrected inequities.
• Support key life experiences across federal agencies.
• Develop shared products, services, and standards that enable seamless, secure, and simple customer experiences across the entire federal government.

3. 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA)

The 21st Century IDEA requires the federal government to enhance the digital government CX for its customers and improve the current requirements for federal official public websites.

For example, federal agencies must modernize websites, accelerate the use of electronic signatures, adopt shared services and standards, and digitize services and forms.

Why Customer Experience Matters in Federal Agencies

Customer experience matters in federal agencies because it can ensure holistic benefits such as:

• Improved Accessibility: A better customer experience can boost access to government services for everyone, including older people, those with limited digital access, people with disabilities, and individuals with limited English proficiency.
• Improved Efficiency: Streamlining and making services more user-friendly can save everyone time and money because there will be less need for repeated government-customer interactions.
• Promoting Innovation: Agencies can use customer feedback to achieve change by adopting modern approaches and technologies.

Steps Federal Agencies Must Take to Comply with the Act

Your federal agency can take several steps to comply with the Customer Experience Act. Here are some quick ones:

• Cultivating Cross-Agency Benchmarking and Collaboration: You’ll want to work with other agencies to coordinate solutions for common customer pain points.
• Capacity Building: You can train your staff on the skills and knowledge required to improve customer service.
• Learn from the Private Sector: The private sector offers best practices in customer service that you can model and adopt in your agency.
• Promote Traditional Service Channels: Even as the government seeks to promote modern service channels, traditional channels are still important for people in highly remote areas or those with limited access to digital systems.
• Adopt Third-Party Modern Technology: You can adopt technological innovation from third-party service delivery providers like Qminder.

Tools to Enhance Customer Experience in Federal Agencies

As a federal agency, you can use various free governmental and paid third-party tools to improve customer experience. Let’s check out some options below:

1. Qminder

You can use our service delivery solution to improve your citizen service experience across different locations. We offer real-time queue management services that let you manage, serve, and track customer queues to reduce the typical wait time woes at government offices.

Our tool gathers up-to-date customer data and measures employee performance to help you make data-informed decisions. For example, you can see which customer service wing requires more staff and assign them accordingly.

Qminder also helps enhance the customer experience in government agencies through the following:

• Self-service check-in kiosk system that minimizes human error by allowing customers to check in on iPads.
• Personalizing customer service through a name-based queue management system that uses a customer’s name as an alternative to the traditional take-a-number system.
• Real-time SMS chats and notifications to improve communications with customers.
• Appointment scheduling service that allows you to seamlessly manage online bookings and automate reminders to reduce attendance bounce rates.

2. Digital Analytics Program (DAP)

The DAP is a free web analytics tool for public-oriented federal government websites. You can use it to gather and analyze data, such as time on page and page views per visit, for insights on improving your customer experience program.

3. Touchpoints

Using Touchpoints, a free tool for government websites that collects and reports on customer feedback, you can manage customer experience initiatives and collect customer feedback.

Challenges in Implementing the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act

You can face the following challenges when implementing the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act:

• Poor Adaptability to Different Customer Needs: Since customer needs are diverse, you can have issues adapting your processes and systems to address each need.
• Multi-Agency Collaboration Bottlenecks: Working with multiple agencies isn’t always a walk in the park. Some aren’t always willing to collaborate. Some customers often require complex services that are difficult to coordinate between multiple agencies.
• Limitations of Free Tools: The disadvantage of free tools for public-facing agencies is that they usually have downtimes because of simultaneous use by many agencies. You’ll have to streamline your efforts using third-party tools, which can be expensive or complicated.
• Poor Leadership Buy-In: Not all the top leadership at your agency supports enhancing customer experience, especially when it involves a shift from traditional methods.
• Evolving Private Sector Customer Experience Practices: Keeping up with the private sector’s ever-changing customer experience landscape can be a race to the bottom. You don’t always fully adopt new standards by the time newer ones emerge.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Let's end today's guide with several questions agencies usually ask about federal government customer experience: Federal agencies measure customer satisfaction primarily by analyzing web analytics and the feedback they collect from their customers through questionnaires. The key customer experience value drivers include:

• Service Quality: Customers declare service effectiveness or perception of value by indicating whether their issue was resolved or they got what they needed.
• Process: Customers rate the service based on sub-categories such as simplicity or ease, efficiency or speed, and equity or transparency. For example, they can show how easy or slow it was to find what they needed and whether they were treated fairly.
• People: In applicable transactions, customers can rate the person who served them based on sub-categories such as employee interaction, competence, helpfulness, and warmth. For example, they can show if the employee was committed to solving the problem.

The Federal Agency Customer Service Act requires certain agencies to publish and report their voluntarily provided customer experience feedback on their official websites every year. Customers can access the CX data of some agencies. The Federal Agency Customer Experience Act of 2021 requires certain agencies to collect voluntary CX feedback on their transactions and services. Each agency must publish the collected feedback on its official website. Each agency must also report to the Office of Management and Budget on its collected feedback and how it solicits customer feedback. The Government Accountability Office is also required to publish a report after assessing the data gathered and submitted by the agencies. You can check out the Trust in Major Government Service Providers dashboard to see how the HISPs collect and report their data and download some of the data you need from the CX Data Collections section.

Conclusion

While the Federal Agency Customer Experience Act can help your agency improve service efficiency and rebuild the people’s trust in the government, these tasks can be too challenging with free tools.

You can increase your chances of multiple successes for your agency, customers, and the entire government using third-party tools.

Qminder is a reliable service delivery platform that can help you streamline appointments, manage queues, personalize customer interactions, and reduce hold times by half. Our tool also helps you gather intelligence to make data-driven decisions a reality.

Sign up for a free trial to see how we can help your agency optimize citizen service holistically.