Customer Experience: People will never forget how you made them feel

At our house, the mail drops in through a slot in the door to the garage and ends up on the floor (don’t ask). On Friday, I saw an envelope on the floor from the IRS. We recently filed taxes for the first year of our business, and filing taxes has never seemed more complicated. So, a letter from the IRS on my garage floor raised my heart rate. I left it there over the weekend because procrastination is a balm against anxiety and a good way to deal with letters from the IRS. I opened it this morning.

“Thank you for using IRS online services. Your personal information was used to access an IRS online service using ID.me on …

If you didn’t access this service:

> Contact us at ….

If you did access this service:

> You don’t need to do anything.”

That’s it. A whole letter, generated, printed, sent in the mail, delivered by our friendly neighborhood postal worker in the heat and humidity, to let me know I’d accessed something online. I downloaded our tax transcript last week, as part of our SBA 8(a) application.

When you’re designing a service, especially a government service, consider how your users are feeling and what they are thinking when you interact with them. By delivering the right message at the right time, you build trust. After all, digital transformation is a trust-building exercise (don’t let the bigs tell you otherwise). And communicating well is the keystone to every good relationship.

Letters from the government are scary. Maybe you’ve been denied a benefit, maybe you’ve got to provide mountains of paperwork to prove eligibility, or maybe you have to pack up your life, and move back to the country you came from. By taking into account the frame of mind your users will be in when you interact with them, you’re more likely to deliver a meaningful experience. We still live in a world where paper is formal and used to communicate Important Things. Use your paper power carefully [2]. Understand the anxiety you might spark, even if your letter is well-intentioned. A text message or email might feel more informal. It’s a good idea to consider multiple channels of communication.

Interactions spark reactions and emotions. By leaning into research to understand your users, you are more likely to elicit the right emotions. After all, if you’re the IRS, you’re building a lifelong relationship.

[0] The title of this article is a Carl Buehner quote, but I first heard it via Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

[1] I don’t love the phrase Customer Experience (CX) when applied to government services. Most people, most of the time, aren’t buying anything from the government. Yes, we pay taxes and receive services in return, but it’s not quite the same.

[2] We could discuss how electronic forms of communication are more likely to reach their intended recipients than paper, but not here, not now.