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Steve:
Can you think of a noncommercial body of people that could teach companies a thing or two about CX?

Chelsie:
In many ways, if you think about what democracy is and how it was conceptualized, that is really CX, which is how do you take feedback from a group of people and use that to help inform decision making.

Steve:
What government customer experience can teach those of us in the commercial space on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at Walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello everyone. I'm Steve Walker and thanks for listening to this episode of The CX Leader Podcast. On our podcast, we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. Here in the United States we don't often think of ourselves as customers of the government, constituents, community members, voters, but not really customers. However, governing bodies from the local, state and federal levels have been embracing customer experience as a way to connect to the community. And we in the commercial realm can learn a thing or two from these efforts. My guests on this episode are going to help us better understand government and CX. Chelsie Bright is the global head of government and Sydney Heimbrock is the chief industry adviser for government, both of whom are with Qualtrics, a world leader and experience management software. And full disclosure, a great partner of ours here at Walker and one that I've had the pleasure of having several of their executives on the podcast in the past. So Chelsie, Sydney, thanks for being guests on The CX Leader Podcast.

Sydney:
Thanks for having us.

Chelsie:
Thank you, Steve.

Steve:
Well, Chelsie, why don't I start with you? You know, one of the things we like to do on the podcast is just give our listeners a little context. So if you would mind giving us a little bit of background on yourself and maybe a little bit of an overview of the government practice there at Qualtrics. But how did you get into the world of CX and then actually end up in a role where you're bringing CX to the government?

Chelsie:
Yeah, thanks, Steve. It's a great question, a very roundabout way for me, actually started out my career in academics as a professor teaching a masters of public policy students how to leverage data science and statistics and research to help inform policy and decision making in the government space and utilize Qualtrics in that capacity to help collect a lot of that data and actually used the Qualtrics platform in my own personal research on that front as well, around voting and citizen engagement with the government. And after a while, I realized that I wanted to be a little bit more hands on with the work rather than just studying it from afar. So I took a position managing the data and research team for the state of California and in that capacity began working with Qualtrics to start collecting feedback from many of our customers at the state level and ended up coming over three years ago to Qualtrics and have been working with our customers across the globe to help design better feedback and customer experience programs and really to take a lot of the best practices that have been developed in the enterprise and corporate world and apply those to government. And as we've gone through this process, I think we've discovered some areas of innovation that are actually happening within government that we can now share back with the corporate space as well, which has been really exciting.

Steve:
Yeah, I can't wait to get into that because I'm fascinated with this topic as we were talking off air. Sydney, I know you're a little newer to Qualtrics, but what's your journey in the CX world been like?

Sydney:
Yeah, so I'm actually really excited to have joined Qualtrics several months ago after a twenty five year career in federal service, including 15 years doing international development and another 13 or so as a federal executive where I helped establish the innovation lab at OPM, which is where I discovered customer experience through human centered design, which is a really transformational set of methods and the mindset around focusing on the human beings that we serve in government and bringing that focus to everything we do. And so customer experience really falls naturally out of that. And what I love about being at Qualtrics is that we are enabling a digital platform through which government organizations can institutionalize design and design thinking in everything that they do. So it's just really cool to be part of continuing to spread that magic across the public sector.

Steve:
And OPM, just for non-government folks, is the Office of…

Sydney:
Personnel Management, the human capital leader of the federal government.

Steve:
So you're really more of an industry vet sort of in the vertical space of the federal government and Chelsie, you'd be a little more like me. You came up, although much better credentialed, but you came up more from the social science quantitative research background. And here you are collaborating with bringing some of these best practices to government. First of all, I'll go back to you, Chelsie, again. But how do you guys define CX in the government space? Because it's not exactly how we would define it in a for profit situation. So and maybe if you could even break it down, kind of federal, state, local.

Chelsie:
Yeah, no, we will, because it does look a little bit different. And it's been really an interesting journey of these last several years of what is CX mean in government and in many ways, if you think about what democracy is and how it was conceptualized, that is really CX, which is how do you take feedback from a group of people and use that to help inform decision making? The challenge with many of the traditional ways of collecting feedback the governments have used is that so often we end up hearing from a very small select portion of the population that are able to provide feedback. So if you think about local government in the town hall, as it was originally conceptualized, where people can come on 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon, provide feedback on bike lanes, there's just not that many people that are going to be able to participate in that. And so as we think about broadening CX and leveraging things that have been introduced into the corporate world, we're able to put a different spin on it and say, you know, we can leverage technology now for the first time in history to really try to hear from everyone and to make that feedback more representative. And where the departure, I would say, from traditional CX, as it's defined in the corporate world, is that a lot of the ways and metrics and outcomes we're trying to achieve are very different in the government space. So we're not trying to optimize profits are really looking at some of these big social outcomes like engagement, trust in government, increasing public safety and educational outcomes, and a whole host of other mission critical elements that governments are focused on. And so we're looking at how do you leverage feedback to help inform that process and help government agencies deliver on that mission more effectively. And the local space, we've been fortunate to partner with some really fantastic organizations and customers like City of Orlando has been one of our older customers, and they have done some really phenomenal work on this, where we spent a lot of time trying to envision what NPS should look like in the government space, because this idea of a net promoter score where your likelihood of recommending a service just doesn't really translate in the government space when you only have one provider to use for your trash and recycling services. And so we ended up coming up with this measure of trust in government to capture the relationship that those residents had with the city and have used that to demonstrate that traditional measures of customer satisfaction are really tightly linked with trust in government. So if you can improve customer satisfaction, you can also improve trust in government. So it's been a really kind of fascinating journey on that front. And know, Sydney, I know that you've been working on this in the federal space, and that looks kind of different, the federal space, given the focus there as well.

Sydney:
Yeah, I think it looks different, but it also has significant similarities. I mean, the underlying truth is that you cannot achieve the policy outcomes without public adoption. And public adoption relies, especially as we move more and more toward digital delivery of programs and services. You have to understand people's behaviors, people's desires, know how to reach people. You have to understand people in order to really drive the adoption required to achieve the mission. And so that's really where we come in, is equipping agencies, organizations with the analysis, the data and analysis that they need to understand the people they serve and to meet them where they are.

Steve:
That's a great overview. You know, I especially like the discussion about how the outcomes aren't the same as in the private sector. You know, in the private sector, we tend to use the feedback to try to predict the kind of behavior we want. So that still works. It's just what do you define as being that behavior you want. And it would be outcomes, so forth. Actually, just listening to you, I wonder if maybe this is the bottom line for government service. That really is in terms of how they engage the public or how they are driving the outcomes. And I don't know if that resonates, but I love the comment. Democracy was built around feedback. And then you you see some of the new business models which really rely on you say Uber, whether it's the passenger rating the driver and the driver rating the passenger. There's sort of an accountability there. So I don't know if that sparks any other thoughts in your mind about that space. But I'm really intrigued with that. And then maybe, maybe how that might relate back to the for profit space.

Chelsie:
Yeah, you know, one of the things that we talk a lot about in the public sector is this idea of the Amazon effect, which is that companies like Amazon have totally come in and transformed the way we engage with organizations and a lot of the expectations that people bring. And that's true of government to where people have much higher expectations of what government should be able to do in the twenty first century relative to often their experience with it. And, you know, if you look at overall trust in government, that's been declining throughout the years. And I think that's in part related to the fact that it's just been really hard for these institutions that are hundreds of years old to kind of keep up with this rapid pace of digital transformation that we've seen. But that gap between trust in governments and governments ability to execute on its mission is really problematic because to Sydney's point, if you don't have people involved in that process, you are engaging those stakeholders. It's nearly impossible to achieve these big societal outcomes. So we've got to figure out how do we start bridging that gap, building trust. You brought up Uber, Steve, right. That system works because we trust the system and we trust the people that are involved in the system. And we've got to figure out ways to begin inserting that into government and enabling governments to get feedback from their stakeholders and start responding to that so we begin to rebuild.

Steve:
Sydney I'll go to you now. But what's encouraging to me, and maybe this is just driven by the popular media and stuff that we're sort of taught to kind of be cynical about government in general, but there are some really exciting things that are going on from a CX perspective in the government. I know in my state, like in Indiana, they're doing a superb job on this vaccination. I mean, they've got a website and you sign up for your appointment and you show up and they know you're coming. And it's really been quite refreshing to see how well they've done that, for example. But maybe you could give us some other examples of where the the government really is leading the way or paving the way for a CX perspective.

Sydney:
Yeah, I actually think that's a great example. We've actually been involved with a lot of states and counties to help create exactly that kind of really seamless experience for people who are already, you know, very rattled by everything that has happened through the course of the pandemic. And so making it easier, as easy as possible for people to figure out where to go get registered, schedule their appointments, follow through with any adverse impact. All of that needs to be as easy as possible because, again, the mission is to get people vaccinated. And you can't do that if if people are not engaging with these websites or other places where they can go to get help. And so we've actually worked on our own solution, which is being used, for example, in Missouri, in the county of Michigan, all over the country. And we're finding that in places where those kinds of solutions are being implemented, the cost, the speed, the citizen and resident satisfaction, I mean, it's all just exponentially better, which, again, as Chelsie keeps emphasizing, that's just critical to increase the level of trust in the programs and everything the programs represent. So that's a just a really great example of where we have really transformed how people understand what their government is and what government's role is to serve them and to solve these really complex, big, hairy problems.

Steve:
Chelsie, any thoughts from your standpoint in terms of where government has been leading the way in some of the CX work that you've seen in your group?

Chelsie:
You know, there's I think, a couple of areas that really stand out. And part of this is because of regulations that governments had in place. But the area of accessibility, for example, is an area that and rightfully so, governments have to have a number of requirements that they follow. So if you think about WCAG – the World Organization in terms of website accessibility, right. That is driven by government regulation. But if we think about how we interface then from a digital platform and make these tools of providing feedback accessible, those government requirements have actually pushed our entire platform and team, whether it's corporate or government, to be more accessible and to think about things. How to someone with that has it in sight impaired, for example, how would they be able to provide feedback on a system? Do we have ways for them to leverage audio solutions? Do we have the ability to have readers be able to scan those intake forms? Have you thought about individuals that might be impaired from a color perspective by someone who is color blind? Right. And we're thinking about that when we're rolling these out. So there's like a whole host of things that we've had to take into consideration from an accessibility perspective on the government side. And those innovations have translated over into the corporate world. Well, as well. We're seeing a lot of the results of that. And so as we kind of work with our government customers to think about how we create really inclusive feedback mechanisms and and look across the board at who we're hearing from, that's certainly an innovation that we have passed on. And there's been utilized by many of the corporate customers. The Qualtrics work with, say, and I know that you've got some examples, too. On the transparency side is another area where oftentimes governments are mandated to be transparent about sharing their results. And there's a whole host of innovations that we've produced, including one of our product launches this year around public facing dashboards that came out of the government space, but is now a feature that's available to a lot of our corporate customers as well.

Steve:
I want to take a moment to tell you about Walker's new report, "Next-level CX for B2B Companies," which focuses on helping B2B companies rise to the next level of their CX excellence. Walker collaborated with the Qualtrics XM Institute and discovered some insightful conclusions about CX maturity and how B2B is performing compared to B to C. Download the report for free today at cxleaderpodcast.com\nextlevelcx.

Steve:
All right, my guests on the podcast this week are Chelsie Bright, who's the global head of government, and Sydney Heimbrock, who's the chief industry adviser for the government practice at Qualtrics. We're having a fascinating discussion about how CX has been applied to government and some of the exciting things that come out of that. One of the things that we've talked about is accessibility. You know, the government has to provide services to everybody and historically has always been a leader in providing accessibility. But Chelsie, you were talking off air a little bit of, you know, kind of how you can leverage technology to enhance accessibility. Maybe if you could just explore that a little bit, because I find this fascinating.

Chelsie:
Yeah, I think it really has been. And I think this idea of exclusivity and being accessible has pushed us to think about how technology can help to bridge some of those gaps that have historically been pretty hard to overcome. And language accessibility is one of those where working with government agencies that do require access through language and in how do we incorporate that into the product. And so one of the things that we've done on that front is to be able to leverage embedded data that it's in people's browsers where you can use that metadata to determine the language that they're already have their system set up for and then surface the feedback mechanisms or surveys or forms directly in their native language, rather than having to ask them to tell you what that is and kind of go to select that from a menu of options. Right. Just for what makes them feel like you've actually done the effort to consider that and also increases the number of people they're going to be responding to that feedback. And that's an area that whether you're a government or a private business, could absolutely utilize to increase the number of people that are responding to make them feel that their opinions are valued and also the validity of the data, because you're asking that in their native language that they're going to feel the most comfortable in.

Steve:
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up accessibility and transparency, because, again, I think transparency is one of the big macro factors that is really driving a lot of the economy today, particularly in a world where access to information is so relatively easy. It's you really can't hide the peanut anymore because the ability for people to access information. So, Sydney, why don't you talk a little bit about transparency. This is a topic that we've had on the podcast before. It's just really, I think key to having a great experience management platform is a fundamental concept of transparency.

Sydney:
Yeah, exactly. And so the the dashboards that we enable can be publicly facing and can definitely demonstrate the return on investment of public money is essentially what it's about. Right? Taxpayers, here's what actually here's what we're doing with your money. Here are the results of achieving for you. And that way people can kind of see the virtuous cycle, right, between what we're all about to do as of now, May 15th, paying our taxes every year and see the investments that that delivers for us. I think the other really interesting thing that's a little different about government and that I've seen personally just really change, really transform over the past decade with the introduction of design thinking and design oriented tools like Qualtrics and sentiment analysis is that governments are getting better and better, not just at the back end transparency after they've delivered a service or policy or program, but on the front end how they engage with people to understand what people actually need in the first place. And as they think about a certain policy question, what assumptions do they have? What do what are sort of some of the unexpected behavioral trends that the people report that government can really incorporate into their approach to designing a solution that's actually going to work. And that kind of discovery research, that kind of real community engagement in the decision making phase is is critical for the kind of what I think of as productive or proactive transparency, where government is really living its democratic ideal of full engagement from beginning to end of the policy cycle.

Chelsie:
Just a build on that Sydney, I mean, one of the examples that have really loved is we did some work with Census throughout the pandemic on the household survey, which was a survey that went out via text message to tens of thousands of Americans, just asking them how they're dealing with the pandemic things from the impact that it's had on their job. To access to food and health impacts and then the census, then after collecting that data and feedback on people's experience with the pandemic, publishes that in public facing Dashboard's. I'm not only so that any of us as citizens can kind of go and see collectively what that experience has been like for a representative group of Americans, but also say that other government agencies can use that. And I think that's a great tool that the public or the private sector could actually utilize more. If you think about a lot of the social mission and work that many companies are doing to be able to engage with their customer base and kind of share the results of the feedback they're getting and how they're using that feedback to drive key decisions that the company is making can be a really powerful tool to building your brand and building your trust with customers, because they've seen that, OK, that feedback didn't just go into a black box. Actually, I was one of thousands of people that had that same idea. And you're responding to that. And that also then kind of reinforces that feedback loop where people are more likely to provide feedback, you know, down the road to continue to engage with you because they've seen that you've really taken that seriously and are utilizing that to make important decisions.

Steve:
Yeah, we talk a lot about closing the loop and kind of the virtuous feedback cycle of using the feedback, acting on it, showing progress and then going back and making sure that that's getting messaged. I wonder if either of you could give us an example of maybe in government where, you know, they have been able to increase the trust in government or they have actually been able to move through a policy recommendation that that actually did result in good outcomes for the government.

Sydney:
I mean, there's lots of examples. So I think Chelsie already mentioned the very rapid pivoting that the city of Orlando was able to accomplish when they had to take all of their services online in response to COVID. And they were able to do that really, really quickly and at the same time use our data collection and analytics capabilities to improve the experiences people had through digitization so that they actually have have the measurable increase in the their their trust metric across all of their different service delivery areas.

Chelsie:
Yeah, and that's that's a great example. We've got another example that comes to mind is some of the work we're doing down in Queensland with their tax and revenue collections. You mentioned tax incentives and it's coming up for all of us where they actually used CX as a way of communicating back and forth with residents and getting feedback on the process as people were providing or providing that they really use this concept of nudges where rather than kind of wait until that last date when things were due, they would proactively reach out to individuals to make sure that they have the information that they needed to see if they needed additional assistance to kind of remind them, hey, you're likely having this amount due. That's coming up. Would you like to get into a payment plan? Would you like to pay that now or are you going to need any assistance? And just by engaging with citizens and getting their feedback on this, not only did they reduce a lot of internal work that would happen after the fact normally, but they also increased the amount of taxes that they're collecting and people's ability to pay by being able to work with them and put them on the appropriate programs. Really cool kind of example of that feedback loop happening throughout the process, not just at the end. I think so often with CX we think about it is something that we do kind of after the transaction happens. And there's a lot of really creative ways to throughout the transaction, especially, it's the longer process to start getting feedback and use that as a way to begin dialog with our customers.

Steve:
Well, Chelsie, Sydney, we've reached that part of the show where I ask every guest to give our listeners a tip. We call Take Home Value. It's your best tip that you hope that they'll take from this podcast and that they can apply. I can think of three or four that I learned along the way here, but I'll give you a shot at your take home value. Sydney, why don't we start with you this time?

Sydney:
Sure. So I would just say the take home value is this: this is not hard. This is easy and just start. We so we have actually made creating these kinds of qualitative data gathering mechanisms really, really easy, both for the people in government who need to sort of design surveys or design the question, open ended questions that they want to ask people, but also for the actual citizens and residents themselves. So we have made it so that it doesn't matter where you are. You don't have to have a laptop connected to Wi-Fi. You could answer on SMS or your smartphone or whatever, wherever you you happen to be. So make it easy. It is easy and just start.

Steve:
Thanks, Chelsie, Jesse, your take on value for our listeners?

Chelsie:
Yeah, it's a build off of Sydney's, I would say the start, but also think about what is the action that you're trying to accomplish when you do that? I think so often we jump into collecting feedback or data with this idea that we want to collect the data. And while that's great, if we don't actually end up taking action on it, that doesn't do us any good as an organization. So, you know, thinking kind of backwards from how are we going to be utilizing this to really drive and transform our business operations and processes. It can be really helpful ensuring that you're collecting data that's useful. And then to the feedback point that we talked about earlier with closing the loop. Right, opening that process out, being transparent about here's the action we're hoping to take. Here's what we found out and here's how we use this to impact our decisions, continues to build upon and engage our customers and throughout the process.

Steve:
Chelsie Bright is the global head of government at Qualtrics, and Sydney Heimbrock is the chief industry advisor for government, both of them at Qualtrics, which is a great tool. And we keep pushing the envelope on the ways we can use this to make the world a better place and very delighted to see people like you who are helping make our government better for all of our citizens. Sydney, Chelsie, thanks for being a guest on the podcast.

Sydney:
Thank you.

Chelsie:
Thank you, Steve. Really enjoy working with Walker and wish at the time

Steve:
If anybody would want to continue the dialog… I did a little research. I see you're both on LinkedIn and so people listen to the podcast will have your names and spellings so they can catch you there. I can see. But is there any website or any place they might want to look on the Qualtrics site just for a little more insights into what you guys are doing in the in the government world?

Chelsie:
Yeah, absolutely. We can send over the link to that website address. We do have some government specific pages with information and some of the stories that we talked about today, as well as, of course, happy to provide our own personal contact information.

Steve:
Great. Well, we'll make sure that we put that on the link for the podcast when we put it out. And if you want to talk about anything else you've heard on this podcast or previous podcasts or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at a podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, our podcast series, our contact information. You can drop a note, tell us how we're doing, or maybe even suggest an idea for a future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker with an experienced management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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