Taking Digital Experience to the Next Level

Taking Digital Experience to the Next Level MARKET TRENDS REPORT

Executive Summary This report looks at how federal agencies are overcoming the challenges associated with providing great digital customer experience (CX) through technology. For guidance, we partnered with Acquia, the open-source digital experience company, on this report. At the end, you’ll walk away with a roadmap for how your agency can be innovative, compliant and secure while giving constituents the content they need in the ways they want it.

This is important because although government efforts to improve CX aren’t new, the pandemic has made the need for it abundantly clear. President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 that called for “continual reform of the executive branch’s management practices and operations to provide service to the public that matches or exceeds the best service available in the private sector.” In 2011, President Barack Obama built on that with an order acknowledging technological developments and again instructed that “government managers must learn from what is working in the private sector and apply these best practices to deliver services better, faster, and at lower cost.” But knowing what’s needed and providing it aren’t one and the same. To achieve digital experience goals on par with the commercial sector, agencies need a roadmap describing specific steps and technologies.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of CX technologies as agencies raced to address the crush of queries to government websites. For instance, the number of visits to Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grew by almost 71% between Jan. 20 and Feb. 20, 2020, according to “Government Websites,” a 2020 report by CFI Group. The agency implemented the Coronavirus Self-Checker chatbot to help people assess risk factors and symptoms.

Get expert advice on creating CX, plus more facts and figures, on the following pages.

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By The Numbers

2.5 billion

the number of visits to federal websites from mobile phones in a 90day period in 2020

4.6 million

the number of customers high-impact service provider agencies reported serving in the second quarter of fiscal 2021, more than double the number of the first quarter

79%

the amount of government officials indicating that automation makes a significant positive impact on their business

“Empowered digital agency teams share solutions and use effective human-centered design practices to create greater continuity, improved usability, and increased access for key digital services.”

– The U.S. Web Design System’s “North Star vision”

84%

the amount of consumers who reported using digital channels more often in 2020

1 billion

the number of pageview requests that CDC.gov received in March 2020

400,000 plus the number of people the Federal Student Aid’s virtual assistant has helped since launching in December 2019

TAKING TAKING DIGITAL DIGITAL EXPERIENCE EXPERIENCE TOTO THE THE NEXT NEXT LEVEL LEVEL

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Agencies Feel Pressure From Rising Constituent Expectations The Challenge: Private-Sector CX Sets the Standard A convergence of two trends is at the heart of the government’s need to improve digital CX. First, digital engagement has eclipsed in-person engagement, said Ryan Picchini, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Acquia.

“More and more of our interactions as human beings are taking place on a website, via a mobile app, via text messages, via a kiosk, and there’s a need for government agencies to connect with citizens in the channels and formats that are critical for engaging with their citizens,” Picchini said.

Second, constituents make little distinction between CX from the public verses the private sector. “It’s all happening on the same phone,” he said, so “if a citizen gets a great experience for parking via a mobile app that was created by the private sector, why can’t they have that great experience with a government-based agency?”

To meet expectations, agencies must provide three types of experiences: in-person, digital and digitally assisted, meaning a customer might start with a chatbot and get directed to a live agent. But many lack the modern IT infrastructure to support that.

Another challenge is a skills shortage in the federal government. “The government is competing with private industry for certain skill sets and cannot always offer the same kind of salary and compensation packages that a lot of the developers, data analysts” and other experts get from industry, said Jonathan Woods, Director of Federal at Acquia.

Lastly, most agencies lack a defined roadmap for what bestin-class looks like – specifically, how agencies can collect and use customer data to create more personalized experiences and drive better outcomes for citizens.

The Solution: A Modern Digital Experience Platform To provide that utility, agencies need a modern digital experience platform (DXP), a collection of technology products that all work together to help organizations deliver an exceptional digital experience to their customers.

The major components of DXPs are web content management, website personalization, campaign management tools, customer data platforms, and analytics and machine learning. And all of that is built on a resilient cloud-based infrastructure to ensure availability, performance and security of digital experiences.

DXPs based on open-source standards such as Drupal in a cloud environment take the platform a level up by enabling other crucial pieces of the CX puzzle: agility, cost efficiencies, scale and the ability to adopt new technology.

“The foundation for citizen experience is content,” Picchini said, and “the foundation [for technology to provide that content] is moving to the cloud.” For instance, if an agency wants to adopt Drupal, it can run it in the cloud with tools to ensure that it’s secure, optimized and regularly updated.

Without the cloud, agencies would need to build each layer internally, which can add time and costs.

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But time is of the essence with digital CX. As the pandemic has illustrated, sometimes agencies need to stand up new content and ways to access it on short notice. As a result, agencies need more content authors – and they need to contribute faster than before.

“Low-code tools are one great way to empower all team members to contribute (with guardrails),” Picchini said. What’s more, that helps keep the CX pipeline moving without waiting for new hires or lengthy training.

As agencies begin to make a roadmap for what IT they want to implement today, they should consider how it will grow over time, especially since they’re likely to use it for a long time. Additionally, agencies must determine who controls the roadmap and where innovation comes from.

With an open-source DXP, agencies get constant access to a global community of active developers, Woods said. “Digital transformation is a crawl, walk, run approach,” he said. “The key is to just get started.”

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Best Practices: 6 Ways to Improve Digital CX Determine your outcome. There should be an overarching outcome you’re trying to achieve, and then there should be sub-outcomes you’re trying to achieve. “That outcome is the first thing you need to think about when it comes to creating great digital experiences,” Picchini said.

Measure the outcome. Agencies need a way to determine whether they are on track to meet their targets. Analytics tools or a net promoter score can help them understand if they’re meeting the public’s needs.

Be agile. Technology changes quickly, “so how do you build an ecosystem to deliver these citizen experiences that’s agile and that’s connected?” Picchini said. Ongoing security and governance can help, and agencies must not just meet current standards, but consider how those could change over time, too.

Ensure connectivity. If the public can’t reach an agency, their trust in it erodes. “The foundational asset for communication – your website – is going to need to hook into a lot of different systems,” Picchini said.

Allow for scalability. New York state had to rapidly respond when COVID-19 hit and scale up to support the increase in the number of users visiting its websites. Being ready for that as customer behavior changes is critical, Picchini said. A cloud-based platform provides that scalability.

Protect privacy. “There’s a limit around what citizens want the government to be able to do with their personal data,” Woods said. To avoid crossing a line, agencies should approach privacy in three phases: • First, recommend content based on browser behavior, not personally identifiable information, and be upfront about your privacy policy.

• Second, when collecting data, use analytics to determine what information the public gets value from sharing, verses what they feel is intrusive.

• Third, some agencies want to share the public’s data to acknowledge what Picchini calls the “full citizen journey.” “That’s in its infancy,” he said. “That is something that many agencies are thinking about to enhance the citizen experience.”

TAKING DIGITAL EXPERIENCE TO THE NEXT LEVEL

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Case Study: Consolidation Improves Accessibility With 35 public-facing websites using many technologies ranging from Microsoft ASP.net to a Unix server, the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) faced an IT support nightmare. For help, it tapped Acquia and development partner GDIT to implement a new digital experience platform (branded DEx) based on Drupal 8, the U.S. Web Design System and Acquia’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)-certified Cloud Site Factory Platform.

Now those 35 websites are consolidated into 20 that are maintained on and governed through the single platform.

That centralization makes it easy for OJP to add new sites without adding maintenance burdens, and it makes them more accessible, mobile-friendly and search engineoptimized. In August 2021, those 20 sites had 2.25 million pageviews and were on track for about 27 million pageviews per year, which is almost double the traffic they received prior to implementing DEx on the Acquia platform.

One website that benefited from the platform’s support is NamUs.gov, a national information clearinghouse and resource center for missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases. Before moving to the platform, the website didn’t come up in a Google search. The team was able to quickly move the site onto the platform and enable Google search, which is already showing benefits.

Now, not only does it come up, but families and law enforcement officials can search for people by name, distinguishing facial characteristics and location, plus Acquia added a translation module that enables a Spanish-language version, which 10% of incoming traffic uses. With its newly improved discoverability, the website has become a strategic tool for accomplishing this program’s mission.

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HOW ACQ UIA HE L PS Acquia offers a DXP that can redefine how agencies provide services. It’s a composable solution for developers, nontechnical users and IT operators that empowers an agency’s entire team to compose and deploy digital experiences for each phase of the constituent journey.

Acquia is the only open DXP, and it provides the highest standard of government compliance, flexibility to deliver many digital experiences, unmatched ease of use and efficient cost of ownership.

Elements of the Acquia DXP include: • Site Factory, which provides a centralized place to build, manage, update and secure all of your sites and digital applications • Personalization, which enables agencies to design and build experiences customized to their constituents • Customer Data Platform, which lets agencies unify their constituent data and unlock insights to better serve their communities “You have a partner in Acquia that knows what is required to effectively support and work with government agencies in delivering great digital experiences,” Woods said.

Learn more: www.acquia.com

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Conclusion CX has made gains in the federal space in the past few years. In 2015, the Veterans Affairs Department established the Veterans Experience Office, and the General Services Administration followed suit the next year with an Office of Customer Experience. Digital.gov provides a Customer Experience Toolkit; the U.S. Web Design System, created in 2015, is an open-source community that provides principles, guidance and code to help agencies deliver great digital CX; and the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act required in 2018 that agencies modernize websites and improve CX. To meet these objectives, however, agencies need to overcome challenges with legacy IT, a shortage of skilled workers and planning for the future. A cloud-based DXP that uses open standards can change the game for agencies, giving them both the foundation they need to build digital CX services and the agility they need to continuously reinvent them.

A B OU T ACQ UI A

A B O UT G OV LO O P

Acquia is the open digital experience platform that enables organizations to build, host, analyze and communicate with their customers at scale through websites and digital applications. As the trusted open source leader, we use adaptive intelligence to produce better business outcomes for CX leaders.

GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government.

GovLoop connects more than 300,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.

For more information please visit www.acquia.com.

For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com.

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