Across the federal government, the push for better customer experience is no longer an aspirational goal. It’s a lens for agency leaders to see what’s working — and what isn’t — when it comes to delivering benefits and services to the public.
During Federal News Network’s CX Exchange, technology leaders from Customs and Border Protection, the Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS) and Maximus discussed how agencies are meeting the moment while also meeting their customers where they are along their journey.
Understanding the government’s customers
CBP is the largest law enforcement organization in the country. It receives data from more than 1.2 million travelers each day — and more than 300,000 importers and exporters every year.
James McCament, CBP’s chief digital transformation officer, said the agency is always looking at emerging technology to stay on top of its mission.
“CBP has been one of the earliest innovators because we’re always trying to stay ahead of the pace of mission. We have 69,000 employees, we have a large-scale budget, but it is always dramatically outsized by the scope of mission to secure facilitation of lawful trade and travel,” McCament said.
Marine Corps Community Services oversees 80 programs and 25 businesses that operate on Marine Corps bases across the globe. Those services include retail services, golf courses, theaters, bowling alleys, childcare center, sexual assault counseling, transition support and financial services.
Dave Raley, CX digital program manager for MCCS, said his team is modernizing the technology that makes it possible to provide quality-of-life services to Marines and their families.
“The top line is we have to be able to securely and quickly deliver IT capabilities that enable mission at the speed of relevance,” Raley said.
MaryAnn Monroe, managing director of the CX Accelerator at Maximus, said the approach of improving CX in government has evolved under recent presidential administrations. The latest evolution is how agencies are using artificial intelligence tools to better serve the American public.
“We are really accelerating the use of service delivery for the people and looking at new ways to do that and improve their experiences across the board, across the government,” Monroe said.
Improving CX through IT modernization
Raley said MCCS’ transformation began with a service blueprint that took a closer look at gaps in the organization’s services.
“It went back almost a decade now, doing a lot of deep research and understanding of who Marines and their families are, and what are their needs and pain points. We used that truly human-centered design type of approach to actually build out the strategy for our organization of how we advance what we do to take care of those Marines,” he said. “We just really had a lot of out-of-date technology capability that we needed to modernize if we were able to fulfill on that mission and vision.”
To get new apps and online services to Marines more quickly, Raley said his office developed an agile authority to operate (ATO) process that allows MCCS to get capabilities approved in 30 days or less. That process can take up to 12 or 18 months in other parts of the Defense Department.
“We had to go get that capability to unlock our ability to start building out the right digital technology and capability to support the customer experience,” he said. “Let’s use cloud native services. Let’s use cloud native capabilities. If it’s a utility service that’s available in general, this should not be a long acquisition cycle.”
McCament said CBP is always looking for emerging technology that can help employees stay on top of a growing workload.
“We’ve always used emerging technology. We’ve tried to lean in as much as possible,” he said. “We’re currently leveraging a lot of the cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence to be able to comb through data to find the anomalies and create efficiencies.”
Today, CBP officers have more data at their fingertips when it comes to monitoring travelers and goods coming into the United States. But McCament said AI can gather real-time insights about the data, so officers “are looking ahead at what they’re doing, not necessarily looking down at the data stream.”
“What evolved for us is being able to leverage technology and integrate it in different ways,” he said. “Multimodal searches and AI integrate all the flows of data coming in. We hand it to our officers and agents, then allow them to do what they’ve been trained to do they want to do — use that human intuition, that skill set, and return time back to their mission by taking administrative tasks off their shoulders.”
Measuring what matters
Agencies have an unprecedented volume of data , but with the right tools, Monroe said, they can turn that data into actionable insights about what’s working — and what needs improvement.
“Metrics need to be measurable and meaningful,” she said. “It’s important to focus on what are we driving, in terms of outcomes, and to be able to tell that story and really speak to the return on investment.”
Raley said everything his team does comes down to three questions: Does a service meet the needs of Marines? Does it support the Marine Corps’ mission? And is it something that MCCS can do sustainably?
“Is this reducing our cost to serve? Can we do this in a much more efficient way that provides that at a lower cost to organization, that allows us to then provide additional services or expand or grow in that area? Are we maintaining relevancy and increasing relevancy with that community? Because they have other choices. They can go outside the gate, take advantage of other retail services,” Raley said.
McCament said CBP relies on its data “as a barometer of what we can do to improve further.”