Making Ordinary Government Experiences Extraordinary

Exceptional customer experience (CX) is no longer a nice-to-have for government, but is an expectation from users, stakeholders, and citizens. This means agencies must consider the human impact for every process and technology solution used to deliver programs.

Many of us have experienced government services in the past and did not enjoy the paper forms, long waits, and scheduling challenges. The public sector has heard these concerns and is motivated to make a change because citizen trust is the currency of democracy.

The time is now to lower the barrier of entry for government agencies to deliver exceptional experiences. Although agencies understand the importance of CX, many still struggle with how to integrate it within and across programs. Utilizing a cloud platform that accounts for the many ways in which stakeholders interact with your agency is a sure way to deliver vital services.

The right platform, like the Salesforce Customer 360 for Government, provides you with the foundational elements of solution architecture helping you expand your approach to CX through process automation, artificial intelligence, and API-led integration. This means you achieve target outcomes while delivering great service.

Recently, our Public Sector team held a webinar to introduce new Salesforce apps that address the needs I've been discussing, quickly and easily improving the customer journey.

These apps supercharge three common functions: scheduling, action plans, and customer feedback. I heard some great questions and comments from government and contractor attendees that I feel are worth sharing. Here are some key insights:

Improve Customer Experience with Stakeholder Feedback

We often are unable to quickly pivot due to the lack of insight we have of our customers. Using a feedback approach creates remarkable visibility into your engagement effectiveness. Pinpointing how programs, services, and resources are accessed, used,and shared, from the viewpoint of the customer, helps you continuously improve. One of our new apps allows you to build surveys right into workflows across the entire customer journey, providing an ever-clear view into what you are doing right and what needs to change.

Automate Business Processes to Improve Efficiencies

With functions like scheduling, action plans, and surveys automated, think of the resources you save (that can be used to manage priorities) and the intelligence you gain regarding how customers are being served.

When you pair process automation of legacy IT functions with repeatable, scalable success for application development, I’ve seen, firsthand, how it opens up many possibilities for innovation across departments. If you use the new Scheduler app to optimize inspection scheduling, your HR teams may customize it for recruitment scheduling purposes.

You can track core processes, end-to-end, to discover gaps and ways to improve outcomes. Scheduler allows you to see the number of appointments that have been requested, rescheduled, canceled, and completed for all or any part of the organization. Given the schedule demands of agency resources, this is a significant value add.

Mitigate Technical and Compliance Risk

Technical and compliance risks are plaguing many organizations, causing them to be reactive rather than proactive when things go wrong. Automation of high-volume workflows gives organizations the ability to achieve compliance and quality measures by ensuring areas of high-potential risks are addressed across the enterprise simultaneously.

Business rules can be built into all three of our new apps, which ensures compliance goals are met while freeing staff to perform high-value work that resonates with their skills and specialties. A win-win across the board and another way agencies can continue to foster trust with those they serve.

We are embarking on an era where exceptional customer service is expected by stakeholders and citizens. Our ability to increase the trust of users, stakeholders and citizens is through purposeful engagement, achieved by utilizing applications that empower all parties across the value spectrum. There is a great opportunity to create extraordinary experiences by leveraging the Salesforce Customer 360 for Government. To learn more about how a SaaS platform can help your agency, visit us at salesforce.com/government.

About the Author

Darryl Peek
Senior Manager — Salesforce Global Public Sector Business Unit