Whats next for CX in government?

The federal government offers a model that others could learn from

If you are interested in the quality of government, the last week has seen an extraordinary degree of change, largely dispiriting. I will keep focusing on how those changes evolve, but as a fellow at the Institute for Responsive Government, I’ve also been looking for some positive examples and models to make government work better.

A new report, I co-authored with Morten Hybschmann, reviews the customer experience (CX) framework that has emerged at the federal government in recent years. Customer service has decades-old roots in the federal government — it was a big focus of Al Gore’s Reinventing Government movement — but the last four years have been different in a couple of ways. One is that a real and substantive framework for improving customer experience exists in a way that didn’t in the past. Another is that this framework considers those who never become customers for public services in the first place, and seeks to reduce the administrative burdens they may face along the way.

An aside: Some of you may bristle at the notion of citizens as “customers” which implies some sort of neoliberal marketized arrangements. I am sympathetic to that as a philosophical argument, and readily concede that government is different from private services in many ways that makes the idea of “customer service” break down. But in practical terms, when we are dealing with government, we typically want what customers want: respectful, prompt and reliable service. Government services lack competition to force innovation, and so managerial frameworks to help to understand the perspective of the people they are serving are a good thing. For example, by one estimate, more than $140 billion of public benefits available to the public each year is not used. If the government succeeds in reducing burdens and increasing access, it could significantly decrease public frustration with administrative processes and the perceived failure of the government to support those in need.

Politically, the building of the current burden reduction agenda began with the use of executive authority. In Trump’s first term, improving CX was a feature of Trump’s Presidents Management Agenda, a blueprint for federal management initiatives (see below).

Biden incorporated CX into his Presidents Management Agenda but also relied on a series of Executive Orders (EOs) and Memorandums. These were shaped by Office of Management and Budget staff who saw customer experience as a useful way to to frame improvements in service delivery. OMB provided internal cross-agency guidance on how to reduce administrative burdens in public services for the first time in February of 2021 and called for public comments about ways to advance equity, including “approaches and methods for assessing and remedying barriers, burden, and inequities in public service delivery and access.” This reflects one theme of the burden reduction agenda – to seek input from the public or advocates about where they experience problems arising in administrative processes.

By December 2021, the Biden administration unveiled Executive Order 14,058 Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. This CX EO mandated that the federal administrative system “reduce administrative hurdles and paperwork burdens to minimize ‘time taxes,’ enhance transparency, create greater efficiencies across Government, and redesign compliance-oriented processes to improve customer experience”. Here are the key elements of the EO:

With the EO in place, the focus turned mostly to implementation. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs issued reports on progress made. CX efforts were tied into performance reporting and budget preparation processes. In April of 2022, OIRA issued new guidance for agencies that expands how paperwork burdens are considered.

Every so often it seemed like Congress might jump in to add their support for the emerging framework. Back in May the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act bill passed the House. The bill was introduced by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and featured an incredibly wide ideological range of co-sponsors, ranging from Democrat Katie Porter to MAGA Republican Nancy Mace. In the lame duck session of the last Congress the Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent, and Biden signed it on January 4, 2025. The scope of the bill is not ground-shaking, but it codifies key elements of the emerging CX framework in place.

The Act requires each agency to designate a senior official to oversee service delivery initiatives, while requiring OMB to identify a Federal Government Service Delivery Lead. In effect then, the Act not only demonstrates a long-term commitment to customer experience; it also confirms OMB as the natural lead for these efforts, providing continuity with practice in previous years.

The Act includes language requiring that the Service Delivery Lead:

• Understands how individuals, businesses or organizations interact with an agency

• Review delivery processes, while considering values such as “ease, efficiency, transparency, accessibility, fairness, burden, and duration, including wait and processing times”¹

• Collecting both qualitative and quantitative data on service delivery
  Evaluate the quality of service delivery

• Coordinate with OMB and other stakeholders on service delivery to improve service delivery practices

The statutory basis of the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act provides some guarantee of continuity of customer experience reduction efforts. Amira Boland, the first-ever lead for Federal Customer Experience at OMB, applauded the new legislation. “Dear OMB: I love you, and now service delivery is also YOUR statutory function too. And the Director *is* accountable for this.” She pointed out that the law codifies “High Impact Service Providers” - that is, the agencies that interact most with the public — as a legal category, demanding that they held to a higher standard.

Boland also echoed the point that “CX is a non-partisan body of work (as evidenced by the bipartisan, bicameral support for this bill and all of the versions back to 2017), but if a new administration didn't love previous Circulars or EOs, this would provide the tracks for work to continue.” In other words, the legislation is broad enough to incorporate different approaches for OMB to manage CX. Trump will be different from Biden in how he uses these tools. For example, he will almost certainly delink the connection between CX and equity that Biden made. But the fact that the Biden EO on customer experience was not one of the ones revoked by the new administration, and that key parts of the CX framework remain on federal government websites that otherwise removed key aspects of Biden’s management agenda, represent hopeful signs for continuity.

The framework is one thing, but what about implementation? In late 2023, Pam Herd, Amy Widman and I issued a report for the Administrative Conference of the United States that offered some provisional lessons. Four themes jumped out:

• Building Culture: Put the Public at the Center. Cultural change is based on embedding the public perspective into processes. This can build on ongoing consultation with stakeholders, direct observation, focus groups, surveying the public, soliciting public comment, the use of complaint portals, and drawing from worker knowledge. Cultural change also depends on leadership commitment to burden reduction.

• Capacity: Have a Devoted Customer Experience Team. Most public organizations lack dedicated specialists with skills like human-centered design to understand and respond to public feedback. Without customer experience specialists, burden reduction efforts will struggle to find traction.

• Collaboration: Build Collaborative Teams Dedicated to Burden Reduction. This involves connecting CX teams to other parts of the agencies, including actors who might engage in potential roadblocks. It also involves collaboration across agencies or levels of government in some cases to solve problems from the citizens’ perspective.

• Simplifying: Increase Access by Simplifying Processes and Providing Support. In some cases, behavioral nudges might reduce learning costs. But more dramatic change involves finding ways to simplify processes or provide support to those struggling with administrative barriers.

There are certainly other frameworks to think about CX or reducing administrative burden in government. But at this point the framework by the federal government is coherent and tested, with some early evidence on implementation. Other governments, including state governments in the United States, could consider what elements from this framework might help to improve customer experience for their own service delivery efforts.