Familiar challenges, new choices: Making the most of customer experience transformation dollars

No matter their mission, every government agency is driven by a mandate around service. And, as stakeholder expectations rise in an increasingly digital world, success must be measured in new ways. This means agencies must be continuously looking and investing beyond traditional core infrastructure in order to add capabilities that improve customer and employee experiences.

While the struggle to improve government CX is longstanding, the federal government’s 2024 budget offers a welcome change to the unfunded dictates of the past. It contains over $500M of agency funds aimed directly at customer experience, with three specific outcomes in mind:

• Reduce administrative burdens
• Pilot online tools and technologies
• Improve agency capacities

The timing couldn’t be more pressing. In an era where remote work and collaboration have become the new normal, agencies are at an inflection point. The decisions and solutions put into place today will shape organizational outcomes for years to come, enabling agencies to meet the always-escalating expectations of their stakeholders.

New thinking about processes, best practices, and digital spending is in order. Additionally, more holistic strategies on service delivery — from communication and document collaboration through decision-making and electronic signatures — are critical to making sure the needs of agency customers remain at the heart of future transformation.

Ultimately, however, this transformation can’t be about “more technology.”

Maximizing a generational opportunity

In fact, for many agencies, more technology is part of the problem, not the solution.

The last few years have been a period of rapid digital acceleration and accumulation. The challenge now is to move from disparate, disconnected systems to more solid, seamless digital foundations. This means agency teams must ask and answer some critical questions.

• Are agency teams and the stakeholders they serve having experiences that meet or exceed expectations?
• Can agencies build in bigger digital pieces that are easier to scale and optimize?
• Where do point solutions fail to meet agency requirements? Where can these point solutions be replaced with more connected experiences?
• Where can existing infrastructure be extended? How can the applications and services already in use today be supercharged to do more?

The answers to these questions will dictate the next phase of the process: moving towards simplicity. And when it comes to digital collaboration and productivity, leveraging trusted platforms where possible can help agencies transform and scale with greater ease.

The Adobe difference: smarter, speedier, simpler

For every creative, collaboration, or electronic signature workload, agencies have many solutions to choose from. But as teams work to better connect services across and between agencies, this abundance of choice creates added complexity, and can become a risk. And, at the same time, the gaps and overlaps created by solution sprawl can make better customer service harder and more expensive.

• Inconsistent experiences leave customers unhappy and burden agency teams unnecessarily.
• Multiple applications and services create redundancy and drive up costs.
• Complexity increases compliance risks by giving IT and security more to manage and secure.

Our work with public sector agencies has shown us how this happens time and time again. But we’ve also seen how Adobe Document Cloud and Acrobat Sign can make a critical difference. Working with federal, state, and local government organizations, we have seen the power of platform modernization over and over.

The City of Seattle was one case in point, where integrating electronic signatures into important agency workloads helped all teams and stakeholders collaborate more quickly and efficiently — any location, any device.

• At the start of COVID, Seattle agencies quickly realized the need to enable compliant remote collaboration for all teams.
• This required new hardware, but more importantly, an integrated e-signature solution that maximized existing technology investments.
• The city decided leveraging Adobe Acrobat Sign integrations with Microsoft 365 was the simplest, smartest, most cost-effective path forward.
• Adoption was fast and effective. Within the first three months of 2020, the number of Adobe e-signatures collected rose 300 percent.

And while the electronic signatures made work more convenient, it also reduced IT and admin hassle instantaneously. As a result, the city was able to continue to meet the high service demands even in the face of remote rules.

Investing in better digital basics

At Adobe, we believe the magic solution providers offer isn’t in solving one-off problems, but in creating digital connections that become part of a larger, smarter, more adaptive whole. Extending an existing investment in tools such as Adobe’s document workflow solutions can help agencies meet new mandates in the following ways:

• Better experiences for employees and stakeholders alike. As the world leader in digital collaboration, productivity, and creativity, we’re not just following standards — we’re setting a higher standard to meet the needs of our agency customers.
• Fewer compliance and security worries. Our FedRAMP-authorized solutions, plus an ultramodern data, privacy, and security infrastructure mean that agency leaders can expand the reach of customer service experiences — anytime, anywhere, on any device — without compromising on compliance.
• Faster time-to-value. Agency teams and their customers get intuitive, familiar applications and tools, for faster learning curves. And back-end integration across applications and processes is automatic.

Finally, and this might matter most when evaluating where and how CX dollars should be spent, extending your agency’s existing technology investment helps deliver superior TCO. Rather than maintain multiple separate expensive licenses across agencies, organizations can dramatically reduce the cost of delivering the services and experiences that will define new standards for government customer service in the digital age.