Gov CX 101: CX vs UX?

For Those Afraid to Ask and Feel like the Ship has Sailed.

Yosemite National Park (Great CX) Picture by Vladimir Kudinov

Only a few enthusiasts truly understand the encompassing field of customer experience. Customer Experience, or CX. To many, it, is misunderstood. In the past, as a User Experience (UX) design practitioner, I felt that what I was doing, designing intuitive digital experiences, was CX. It is not. User Experience is a single point in the journey of a customer experience.

Good UX could contribute to an overall positive CX, but a good UX on a website without a satisfying CX outcome can be a distraction. To reiterate, a highly sophisticated UX transformation can have nearly unchanged yields on improving overall results for the Customer. You would not talk about improvements to your kitchen to people who are explaining the problems with the foundation of the house. We should try to distinguish between CX and UX whenever possible.

What good is it for an organization to have an intuitive, learnable, and user-friendly website, but the customer ultimately ends up at the wrong branch office with the incorrect forms to file for benefits?

When I spoke to others, most people understood CX as a practice that fell somewhere between UX and Human Centered Design/Interaction. Clearly, more information on some key functions of CX would help to clarify the differences.

1. Customer Experience refers to the entire journey of a customer navigating a business process or achievement.

Here are examples of the major and omni-channel CX journeys in the Federal Government:

1. Student Loans Processing- Department of Education
2. Naturalization- USCIS
3. Passport Services — Department of State
4. Decennial Census — US Census Bureau
5. Healthcare, education, employment benefits from Vets.gov- Veterans Affairs
6. Hurricane and Disaster Relief- FEMA

Disaster Relief, First Responders — All Public Services that Interact with Citizens

In all of these services, it’s important to keep in mind that:

1. Customers face multiple channels of interactions in a single journey to achieve a goal (phone, emails, branch offices, and websites).
2. For example, junior contract specialist of a large Agency attempting to navigate the acquisition process to purchase bulk software.
3. Also empathize with the experience of a 17 year old applying for Federal student loans at the local community college with Korean speaking parents.

2. Customers can be internal or external

1. Internal customers of an Agency refers to recipients or users of Internal services like employees who need IT, benefits, training, onboarding, and payroll.
2. External customers of an Agency refers to recipients or end-users of the Agency’s external services, for example: SSA’s Social Security Recipients or Veteran Patients at VA’s Hospitals.

3. To be very clear, CX is where the rubber meets the road between the Federal Government and the Public of the United States of America.

1. We distinguish the Public from “Citizens,” to include all individuals living in and visiting the US.
2. For example, TSA’s Security Officers, Customs and Border Protection’s Patrol Officers, National Park Service’s Park Rangers often deal with temporary residents to the country. These agencies clearly accommodate a wide range of customers, who may not be citizens.
3. Trust and Confidence in Government is directly correlated with CX

4. Achieving a CX-driven organization requires a fundamental shift in the core of the business.

1. CX is a matter of a long-term, strategic vision that will require major scrutiny of technology, employee culture, investments, data and data hygiene.
2. CX leadership comes from the top down. One should not mistake a drastic improvement to a web service as an improvement in customer experience. Leadership must be customer obsessed and then empower employees through a continuous feedback loop.
3. CX means that a leader of the Agency or organization is asking the tough and loaded question: “Does this improve outcomes for my customer?”

4. When CX is prioritized, it changes every single thing.

1. Companies such as Amazon or Disney have a core mission of customer obsession and delight. Every interaction with these companies, if it does not result in the positive outcome, contains a corresponding remedy for the customer’s experience. For example, if the product was not good, the return will be easy.
2. The overarching vision to place good CX as the focal point is entrenched in the roots of these organizations. The vision branches out to effect every decision in every department — HR, Marketing, Finance, IT and Sales.
3. Talking about surface-level changes to digital services is not the same as talking about CX transformation.

5. The people best equipped to execute Digital CX transformation are not UX designers.

1. You will require a team of highly skilled business analysts and system analysts. People whose skill it is to identify the business process, identify the value proposition, extract the experiences and to re-engineer it.
2. You will require a team of empathetic and passionate civil servants who truly understand how good CX will improve the lives of their end users.
3. You will require leaders who completely embrace what improvements to CX will mean for the trust, longevity, security, and reputation of their organization.
4. IT-led CX transformation happens. It will require coordination with agile teams of UX designers and developers who will need the proper content and business requirements to make sure the major customer touchpoint of the 21st century — the web — reflects exactly what the Agency intends it to.
5. Often times, UX designers and business analysts find themselves most equipped and situated to handle a CX challenge within a complex IT project. Leadership must support these efforts, but understand the added complexities of UX vs CX.

Finally, a focus on CX in Government is a reiteration of the commitment to improve the lives of the American Public by delivering services anytime, anywhere on any device. It’s about improving the entire journey when the public needs a government service in their everyday lives, in times of emergency or at important life events. There are no shortcuts to CX improvements, but the payoff is huge. Improved CX directly contributes to trust in Government. There will be moments in every Agency’s longevity in which they will require the vocal praise and trust from the people we have sworn to serve.

In the coming years, perhaps and partly as a result of the President’s Management Agenda, we will have a dedicated focus on the improvement of Government Services and CX Outcomes. Hopefully, this will set more of us on the CX transformations across the Government.

The President’s Management Agenda has set a foundation for improving citizen services in the coming years. By addressing the major challenges and shortcomings that arose from statutory, administrative, management and regulatory practices designed in the past that no longer align to the realities of today, the government can deliver improved citizen services.

[Cross Published on Dorris Consulting International Service to the Citizen News Letter №13. August 2018]