The power of surveys
Surveys are an incredible research tool. They play a key role in helping agencies get closer to their taxpayers, constituents, end users, residents—or whoever else their “customer” is (for the rest of this guide, we'll simply refer to all end users as a “customer”).
Soliciting direct input from those you serve is the most effective way to boost satisfaction, address problems, optimize resources, and ensure your programs, policies, and services reflect community needs and demographic characteristics.
Surveys help include customers in decision making processes that impact them, and help assure leaders that the decisions they make reflect the needs of the public.
Surveys deliver statistics and insights that help government bodies:
- Understand community demographics and intuit their needs, preferences, and priorities
- Identify how experiences vary from across your customer base, and where service quality gaps exist
- Research and pinpoint experiences that cause friction—or break trust
- Engage and support the workforce through best-in-class conduct
- Gather useful additional information for shaping policies and services
Learn more: Improve government service delivery with Qualtrics
The government survey landscape
Government agencies face a raft of challenges when it comes to customer experience programs. Even aside from staffing bottlenecks and reduced budgets, conducting surveys in this space is an inherently tricky task simply because of how broad the scope can be.
Collecting surveys can be done in person, online, and on various contact center touchpoints—and across departments—with the result often being siloed data that’s difficult to parse for any real insight.
The trouble is, it’s impossible to enact meaningful CX change without being able to bring information, statistics, and insights together into a single source of truth. And this is a problem facing agencies at every end of the scale, from a city permitting office to a cabinet-level department.
This is a challenge we’ll explore solutions to later in this article, but first: let’s look at the three main survey opportunities government bodies can utilize.
Three types of government surveys
1. Transactional surveys
Transactional surveys collect customers' input on specific touchpoints with the government, such as navigating a federal government site or paying a fee. These are used to gather baseline data, identify the root cause of customer pain points, and benchmark progress over time.
Transactional surveys can also be used to close the loop on single-instance issues, and help government agencies identify systemic improvements that will make the biggest difference for customers’ experience.
Results include:
- Established baseline and benchmark data
- Closed loop on single-instance issues
- Identification of general customer pain points
- Additions to respondent panel
2. Relational surveys
Relational surveys ask customers for input on their overall experience rather than a specific interaction. They are used to gather baseline data, provide an overall picture of perception, and benchmark progress over time.
A relational survey can also be used to understand how specific experiences impact overall perception, and help leaders prioritize areas of focus for improvement.
Results include:
- Established baseline and benchmark statistics
- Relationship between relational to transactional data
- Identification of focus areas
- Additions to respondent panel
3. Project and journey-based surveys
Project and journey-based surveys seek input on the common things customers experience, think, and feel throughout their entire journey or specific parts of it. They’re used to research pain points in a specific journey, close the loop on systematic issues, and inform improvement initiatives.
Results include:
- Identification of general customer pain points
- Closed loop on systemic issues
- Informed improvement plans
- Additions to respondent panel
Government survey best practices
Cast the net wide
Make sure you get a representative view of the entire population you're serving, and look at all the distribution methods available to ensure you hear every voice.
Why?
This is critical to designing policies and programs that are more relevant to the needs of the public. Only a small portion of the population tends to actively provide input, so it’s important to use your surveys to seek out voices beyond those who are already vocal to ensure you reach a representative sample.
How?
Make it as easy as possible for people to respond by promoting surveys on multiple channels, such as text, email, and QR codes in popular public locations. For a more in-depth survey, consider incentivizing responses by providing compensation—a gift card or financial incentive—for people who respond and offer their lived expertise.
With feedback from all the channels your community members interact on, agencies can gain a deeper and more holistic understanding at every stage of the customer journey.
Remember
It’s not likely that a simple survey tool will have this capability. And, the most important piece of all is demonstrating to your community that you are committed to taking action based on the feedback they provide. It’s not “survey fatigue” it’s “lack of action fatigue” that causes people to disengage.
Look for a comprehensive experience management or customer experience platform that enables you to take immediate action on your results.
Know what you want to measure
There’s plenty of underlining variables that could get in the way of your results. Understanding what you want to measure before writing your survey questions can greatly impact the results of your survey.
Why?
Defining the concepts you need to measure in order to answer your research question(s) ensures your survey fulfills its purpose.
How?
Tie each survey question back to a specific objective you want to achieve, such as improving customer satisfaction during a certain process or creating more accessible service for a particular group. It’s helpful to come back to your vision—why are you asking questions, what actions will be taken, and who will take them?
The right tools can help here. Qualtrics® Government Web Experience solution, built for government by government and CX experts, includes expert-validated questions and a dashboard that allows you to see and report on the factors that drive experience.
Remember
Learning how to write survey questions is both art and science.
The wording you choose can make the difference between accurate, useful data and just the opposite. Qualtrics offers surveys and resources specific to government use cases, built by research experts and government industry leaders.
Focus on your people
Delivering better customer experiences starts with the people responsible for them. Your employees are both your biggest asset and one of your most important feedback sources.
Why?
Lots of organizations gather customer opinion, but many forget to check in with the people delivering the services they ask customers about. Not only are employees full of ideas on how to improve, it’s also important to check in on their well being and satisfaction with their jobs.
As agencies struggle to attract and retain their workforce, it’s important to understand what it takes to not only retain them, but keep them engaged and fulfilled.
How?
Pulse employees regularly to learn what they place the most value and importance on, and turn findings into an action plan.
Remember
Just like community engagement, it’s critical to show your employees that you’re committed to taking action. To help identify where to focus efforts, Qualtrics has identified the most pressing EX KPIs to keep on top of:
Tips for implementing surveys across state, local, and federal agencies
- Although lengthier surveys are sometimes necessary, the shorter the better. Use display logic to ensure respondents only see questions intended for them.
- Look for a platform that helps you optimize the look, feel and accessibility of the survey structure (like Qualtrics).
- Leverage strategically placed open-text responses for highly impactful insights (typically no more than one).
- Because experience data is dynamic, consider frequent review and action. Leverage role-based dashboards to make this a part of regular operations.
- Manage contacts to keep a close eye on survey frequency, preferences, and historical knowledge.
- Include a survey panel opt-in question to build your list of future survey participants.
- AI can help you understand sentiment and opinions at scale. Tools with natural language processing can turn conversational data into actionable insights.
How to maximize the ROI of every survey
You don’t need to be a census bureau to feel the benefits of asking people how things are going. Surveys are inherently valuable because they help agencies make confident, data-driven decisions that impact customers' lives, experience and perception.
But, moreover, they directly inform measurable outcomes—helping government agencies report on proactive change and service improvements.
In an environment where every decision must be justified to oversight groups, officials, and internal stakeholders, surveys act as an auditable input to investment outputs.
Connecting those dots requires a robust survey program—and the right tools to help tie feedback to measurable outcomes.
But the value of any given survey tool can extend well beyond surveys alone.
Agencies that adopt a fully-fledged experience management program are able to build systems of action that capture thoughts and opinions at moments that matter, measure key drivers and patterns through natural language processing and AI, and close the loop with automated workflows that pass insights to the right support teams for follow up.
A real-world government survey example
Let’s look at an example. A one-time evaluation survey may help you assess the overall experience of getting a marriage license at the time responses were collected.
An agency leveraging experience management would know exactly how the public wants to complete a marriage license application (online, in person, by mail, etc.) because they gathered this insight in advance. They would gather post-transactional feedback to continuously improve the process, and use the resulting information as a tool to coach customer service representatives, program owners, and more.
Some agencies with strong interagency collaboration may be able to take this even further—for example, prompting the marriage license applicant to begin a name change process with the relevant department, if applicable.
This moves an agency from a reactive to proactive position, improving the likelihood that customers can complete processes quickly and easily, from the beginning. It's the difference between fixing problems after the fact and designing services that work the first time.
Position surveys at the heart of your CX program
The realities of today’s government environment mean that customer experience can seem like an uphill battle. Workforce reductions, budgetary pressures and cuts all put mounting pressure on bodies to do more with less.
A robust survey program can help because they help identify and prioritize pain points—letting teams focus on building better services where they’re needed, even under resource constraints.
But the right tools are imperative here. Surveys form a key part of wider customer experience efforts, and that experience management process requires ongoing guidance from software that can monitor, understand and act on the information customers provide—on any channel.
More than 600 state and local government organizations and 300 federal clients—including every federal cabinet-level department—trust Qualtrics to help them design those best-in-class customer and employee experiences.
With Qualtrics, you can:
- Unify feedback across every touchpoint. Capture customer and employee signals from digital services, contact centers, and in-person interactions—then use AI to surface where people are struggling and route issues to the right teams before they escalate.
- Reduce cost to serve. Well-designed, insight-driven services reduce errors, repeat contacts, and unnecessary steps. Qualtrics helps you identify those inefficiencies and prioritize fixes that free up resources and improve outcomes.
- Support your workforce through change. The same platform that manages customer experience also supports employee listening, pulse programs, and lifecycle feedback—so your people stay engaged and empowered even in periods of significant transition.
- Operate securely. Qualtrics' FedRAMP High-authorized Gov environment supports continuous monitoring and is trusted by federal, state, and local agencies—meeting applicable security requirements.
