Governments across the globe are building customer experience programs with a clear goal: improve service delivery in ways that matter to the people they serve. Done right, people get what they need faster. Call volumes, escalations, repeat contacts go down, and customers and employees win.
Two agencies are leading the way. The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Consular Affairs moves tens of millions of visitors a year through a single digital front door, travel.state.gov. Targeted feedback gave them the insights they needed to help customers complete their key tasks.
Missouri's statewide customer experience program (SHARE MO) touches nearly every corner of state government. A small central team built the infrastructure for 15 agencies to get results.
Both started where most government programs do, with feedback that was hard to act on and customers dropping off before finishing their journeys. Here's what it took to get from there to here.
Ask general questions, get general answers
The U.S. Department of State’s travel.state.gov website was the front door for millions of people navigating passports, travel advisories, and consular appointments. Like most government sites, the team collected feedback through a pop-up survey, triggered at random, asking general questions that weren’t specific to what the customer was actually trying to do.
The responses poured in. And most were so vague that they were functionally useless.
It wasn't that people weren't sharing. But the survey had become the catch-all place for customers to communicate issues. All kinds of problems were intermingled in one bucket, and lacked context - making it difficult to triage actionable website issues and act on what customers were reporting.
Ask better questions, in better places
The State Department moved to collect feedback in more locations, where they could better pinpoint the friction as it was happening. They added a prompt on every page of the redesigned site so visitors could flag a problem on the page the moment they hit one. Behind the scenes, the new feedback mechanism allowed the website team to know the exact page the customers were on when they sent in the feedback. This added needed context to vague feedback like “the link is broken” – turning it from a needle-in-a-haystack hunt through the entire site into a targeted investigation of a single, known page.
In six months, the site had 19 million page views. There were 900 issue submissions to the new feedback form, but this time every submission was tied to a specific page and a specific problem the team could act on quickly and fix.
Find the friction
Missouri's unemployment-to-rehire process crosses two separate agencies.
When the team mapped the user journey, they found only 7% of people completed the task they came to do. Somewhere along the journey, they were losing almost everyone.
The drop-off point? It turned out to be one question. The team fixed it. Completion doubled overnight.
Hundreds more Missourians navigated a process they needed to complete. The entire intervention cost the team almost nothing because the journey map told them exactly where to look.
Every experience is connected
When the State Department built feedback into the new online passport renewal tool, they asked customers who took the photo they submitted as part of their application, even though this step happens prior to using the online tool.
The data revealed that customers who used a major passport photo provider had a higher rate of approval problems later in the process than if they had used other providers.
The State Department took this info to the provider directly. They shared what customers were reporting outside the government-owned steps of the process and where it was breaking during the overall passport application experience. The provider retrained their staff on passport photo requirements. Satisfaction on the process recovered for both government and the business providing the photos.
A customer’s experience with government services doesn't always start and end at the agency’s front door. This innovative government listening program allowed State to share data with upstream parters to fix a problem they couldn’t have the context to understand on their own. Customers win when government and private businesses work together to provide excellent service to their customers.
Make listening everyone’s job
In year one, Missouri had 6 customer experience projects. Today it has 500. But the team hasn't grown.
What grew was the infrastructure around them. Self-service onboarding. Specialist workshops for agencies modernizing paper-based processes. A statewide resource hub, built by a single analyst, that any agency can access for help, training, or a direct line to technical support.
Last year, 114 support builds were completed.
This is what customer experience scale looks like in government. A smaller team building the conditions for everyone to feel empowered to action.
The agencies making real progress on service delivery are turning understanding into outcomes that meet the needs of customers they serve.
The State Department and Missouri have shown what that looks like in practice: customers completing the tasks they came to do, and agencies spending less time cleaning up friction by creating experiences that hold together across every touchpoint.
