One of the most important steps toward providing a good customer experience is to keep complexity from getting in the way.
As agencies undertake CX initiatives, they are likely to find themselves having to work around the limitations and architecture of legacy systems. The challenge is to make the experience as seamless as possible for the user.
“In a modern, self-service culture, it’s no longer acceptable to pass the customer around from legacy system to legacy system or require them to call an operator who collects or disseminates information over the phone,” said Kale Fluharty, Director of Federal at Liferay.
Liferay provides a digital experience platform designed to make it easier to facilitate a seamless experience, whether the intended customers are constituents or employees. It has more than 15 years of experience providing agencies with personalized, self-service solutions.
Getting Personal
In one case, Liferay and its partner, Imagine Believe Realize (IBR), worked with the Navy to replace a group of portals with a modern, consolidated solution that could be personalized according to both user preferences and paygrade.
The Navy wanted to provide one-stop access to online human resources, education and training information that helps sailors navigate their career paths. But those resources were scattered across several underlying systems and databases. And with the Navy looking to make the system available to 870,000 potential users, it would be infeasible and expensive for a patchwork, stovepiped system to meet the Navy’s performance requirements.
Liferay’s digital experience platform provided a modern, futureproofed way to bridge those systems and simplify access to information and services. The platform also made it possible to personalize access and services without compromising on security or diminishing performance.
Standardizing Good CX
One benefit of the current push for better CX is that agencies are trying to deliver more consistent customer service across their organizations, said Frank Lacson, Human Centered Design Lead at IBR.
In the past, the quality of CX tended to vary across divisions or, in the case of the Navy, across commands. Like other agencies, the Navy is looking to standardize on best practices and share lessons learned. That makes for a much less jarring experience as service members move from one command to another.
“Delivering a consistent customer experience helps users transition gracefully between their personal and professional lives,” Lacson said.
Continuously Improving
But standardization does not mean stagnation. Agencies should look for a platform that provides an agency a continuous data-driven feedback loop. That includes:
- Capturing data about the customer journey
- Automating the analysis of that data to provide insights into what’s working and what’s not
- Making it easy to modify the experience based on those insights
This agile approach to CX “helps agencies quickly have an impact on how they are doing business and raise their CX scores,” Fluharty said.
This article is an excerpt from GovLoop’s guide “Customer Experience Beyond Memos: A How-To Guide.” Download the full guide here.
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