Biden’s New Executive Order tries to make the Federal Government work more like Google

While the citizens of Estonia can establish a business, pay their taxes, and vote all in one day online, Americans will spend over nine billion hours each year simply complying with our complex web of tax systems. While governments around the world are leaning into real time engagements on digital platforms as key sources of constituent experience & understanding the immediate impacts of policy choices, our bureaucracy has lagged behind in adopting these tools, finding themselves instead with customer satisfaction scores lower than internet service providers and utility companies, to name a few.

The Biden administration wants to change that. On the heels of a quiet change to OMB guidelines requiring Federal agencies take ‘Customer Experience’ more seriously by ‘improv[ing] people’s lives and the delivery of Government services’ across 17 Federal agencies and 36 unique improvement initiatives. The administration released a new executive order codifying that language into immediate action, calling on agencies from Social Security, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security and more to reform critical citizen-facing operations.

It could not come at a better time. During COVID-19, U.S. state and federal agencies have been pushed well beyond their breaking point, and rather than Estonian-style digital tools helping meet the challenge, health systems in Alaska received around 1,000 faxes per day, and in Harris County, Texas, data was faxed in such large numbers that hundreds of pages of testing information sprayed out of the machine and all onto the health department floor.

Today, customer experience in the public sector has largely been driven by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, defined mostly through the collection of public surveys, forms, and interviews as key methods of including the voice of the constituent in program rollouts. Over time this process has grown to include email collection for many agencies as well, but across most of the Federal government the vast majority of interactions happen well before an email or survey is collected.

For example, the Dept of Health and Human services engages with hundreds of millions of users every month on their websites alone, which are used as simple ways to disseminate general information rather than as the extremely valuable source of information to gauge constituent experience that they are. So too with tools from mobile apps, advertising systems, on-site search & chat information, and other digital media tools that don’t make their way into the IT or policy systems of government. Without these tools being front and center of customer experience plans, it will be nearly impossible to meet the rising expectations of constituents today.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated the digital transformation of State & Local governments in a myriad of ways that show a path to a new era of public sector capability. Google Cloud helped support States trying to make overburdened systems more resilient & responsive to user needs — in Wisconsin, the unemployment office had to scale UI claims services & associated internal IT maturity rapidly, during a crisis event, with no prior framework for the scale they needed to operate at. By reorienting around a modernized digital front door that linked the user experience explicitly to the IT system, Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development was able to process millions of claims, billions of dollars in transactions, and serve hundreds of thousands of constituents while reducing overall fraud, waste, & abuse in a matter of weeks. Similarly, relying on a collection of anonymous constituent feedback systems from surveys, call centers, paid media, search, and public datasets the State of California’s Office of Digital Innovation worked to understand constituent vaccine hesitancy scores by geography and HPI quartiles. The data, organized & modeled centrally, was then customized to different administrative teams who used it for vaccine logistics decisions, targeted communications, epidemiology analysis, and more. In both examples, tools that are used today for simply disseminating information showed high value to policy goals including but well beyond improved communications.

And constituents today have high expectations of organizations catering to their personal needs. 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience, and 90% of consumers are willing to share personal behavioral data with companies for a cheaper and easier experience. Businesses have taken note, with 98% of marketers saying personalization advances customer relationships and 89% of digital businesses therefore investing in personalization. The public sector faces these same expectations — In 2019, 80% of federal agencies scored “poor” or “very poor” on Forrester’s US Federal Customer Experience Index, compared with only 14% of brands in the private sector.

At Google, connecting systems and user experience across platforms is key to improved user experience. Nest allows you to connect your home systems together, Maps remembers Home and Work commutes and alerts you to traffic patterns at regular times of day when you typically travel, Search autocomplete and voice-enabled querying allows easier and more natural ways of getting information, and all these systems connect together with Google — you can ask your Home device how far it is to ‘work’ today, and then ask a follow up question about the weather. If the Federal government were to replicate this level of user experience, if you applied for a 504 loan at SBA to start a new business facility, the Federal Reserve would then tell you best places to invest where industry capacity is lacking, then the Postal Service would recommend you best-in-class shipping rates for your new business, then the Dept of Labor would recommend local veterans eligible to hire in your field, and so on. These outcomes are eminently achievable & the Biden administration’s executive order lays out the first framework to bring Government experience to Google levels. If Estonia can do it, America can too.