Today’s consumers are connected, informed, and tech-savvy. They expect their favorite companies to provide exceptional and innovative customer service online. Those expectations now apply to consumers as citizens – they want government agencies at all levels to offer service and support whenever they might need it, and offer a seamless experience across the board. This represents a major shift in how agencies approach their mission...

What do people look like when they are on your network or accessing a website or system? In most cases, a person is assigned a username, role and access rights that govern their interactions with the organization or agency. This controls what they can and cannot do within a network, application or website. But what should bots look like when they are operating on your network? Interestingly, a bot should not be treated differently: it must be...

Customer experience (CX) has been embraced by many private sector organizations to help stand apart from the competition and improve customer loyalty. Its growth in the public sector has been accelerating as well, and currently over 22 federal agencies have established some form of formal CX function. Will Congress standardize federal agency organizational design to include a CXO, following the precedent of CFO’s, CIO’s or, most re...

The United States transitioned from just a recurring flu season to a full pandemic with the infiltration of the Corona Virus. This pandemic caused the healthcare system to turn upside down and develop new pathways, processes, and techniques for not only tending to and treating the COVID patients, but also treating the general populations with the daily medical and surgical conditions. So many changes occurred in the healthcare system in a very...

The COVID-19 has been an accelerant for innovation and modernization. The Federal government impacts nearly every aspect of American life, contributing to the health, safety, security and economic stability of people in America and throughout the world. Whether it's ensuring the safety of the food we eat and the water we drink, responding to national emergencies, providing benefits for veterans with disabilities, enhancing the safety and relia...

While we never know what the future holds, what makes the 2020-2021 academic year especially challenging is that we do not have a playbook for educating students in the middle of a pandemic. K-12 schools are trying to balance an operating plan with daily changes to evolving safety and health regulations. The current environment has dramatically accelerated the use of interactive communication tools, including teleconferencing, video, SMS/text,...

Improving the customer experience has been a federal focal point for several years now, but many organizations still struggle with turning basic goals like "better design" and "meet digital natives' expectations" into a practical program to improve CX. In this GCN editorial webcast, GCN editors will speak with CX experts within government about what's worked for them, and how to make sure CX investments pay dividends across the enterprise. Thi...

The Office of Management and Budget has established a Cross-Agency Priority Goal charging government to provide a modern, streamlined, and responsive customer experience across public sector organization. Government executives are embracing the concept of customer experience as a means to improve the usability and reliability of critical digital services like patent services, veterans’ benefit delivery, student loans, disaster aid, and t...

For many public sector communicators, the rush to send mass announcements about COVID-19 health information is being replaced by a need to inform a variety of audiences at scale for everything that’s come after. Whether communicating community risk levels, sharing testing information, or handling any number of unexpected scenarios, your audience will put new demands on your work. How do you do it well — at scale? In this webinar, y...

Agencies have made significant progress in improving interactions with their citizen customers by modernizing their infrastructure, moving to the cloud, using agile digital services and emerging technologies on the front end and capturing and analyzing the data on the backend. There is still work to be done, however, and the 21st Century IDEA Act -- passed as part of the 2018 NDAA -- has added new priorities for improving and expanding the typ...