Simple, seamless, and secure government interactions are essential to meeting increasing user expectations. The key is a total experience approach that leverages cutting-edge technologies to empower employees while satisfying customer needs.
Digital modernization is changing the way people interact with their government. As customer experiences are enhanced by advanced digital tools and solutions, expectations are growing for similarly innovative government services.
In response to this transformation, the federal government is prioritizing its “mission to deliver a simple, seamless, and secure customer experience (CX), on par with or better than leading consumer experiences.” While keeping up with technology advancements is often a challenge for the public sector, the right solutions create positive outcomes as well as build trust among the millions of people engaging with government every day.
Introduction
People are used to conversing with their merchants at a click of a button, and they are expecting the same ease of use when they're interacting with their government.
Michelle Paiz, Vice President of Citizen Engagement
Maximus
Learn more about how Maximus TXM can help federal agencies fulfill their missions to enhance customer experience.
A total experience
approach to transforming federal customer experience
IMMERSIVE ARTICLE
While creating positive experiences is always key to serving the public, rapid technological advancements are changing the government’s approach. Digital modernization drives higher expectations for improved outcomes and increases demand for omnichannel interactions. This enables customer interaction from any device, anywhere, and anytime.
“Just like the commercial world, we’re seeing a transition from straight voice calls to new mediums like chat, SMS, web calling, social media, and more,” said Michelle Paiz, vice president of citizen engagement at Maximus. “People are used to conversing with their merchants at a click of a button, and they are expecting the same ease of use when they're interacting with their government.”
On top of omnichannel communication, people accustomed to modern contact center conveniences like 24/7 support, automatic callbacks, and real-time chat now expect to see similar technologies employed by the government.
While these commercial advancements can serve as models for federal agencies, improving government experience presents unique hurdles. Bridging the quality gap between commercial and government interactions requires not only upgrading tools and technologies, but doing so in a way that prioritizes security and meets federal compliance requirements.
“There are additional security requirements when you're working with government agencies,” Paiz said, “and that has been the biggest challenge in establishing the communication channels the public wants while doing so in a FedRAMP compliant environment.”
As agencies, particularly high impact service providers, follow directives to prioritize CX, an experience management solution designed specifically for government is essential to deliver the seamless interactions people have grown to expect. With more than 40 years of experience supporting government’s largest contact centers, Maximus understands this critical need and the best strategy to meet it.
Maximus Total Experience Management (TXM) Solution embodies a holistic approach, providing an end-to-end view of the total experience for both customers and employees. It prioritizes the user, ensuring technology and processes are efficient, impactful, and secure. TXM integrates data-driven insights, human-centered design, and modular, scalable technologies to deliver measurable results in quality, satisfaction, and effectiveness. By elevating the total experience for both customers and employees, TXM empowers federal agencies to deliver service excellence with every interaction.
Bridging the gap between expectations and outcomes
“There are additional security requirements when you're working with government agencies, and that has been the biggest challenge in establishing the communication channels the public wants while doing so in a FedRAMP compliant environment.”
Michelle Paiz, Vice President of Citizen Engagement, Maximus
The Federal Customer Experience mandate centers its mission on three essential requirements: simple, seamless, and secure.
SIMPLE
“From a caller’s experience, simple means they have one place to go, a one-stop shop where they are able to get their questions and issues resolved quickly,” Paiz said. From an agency perspective, a simple solution also easily adapts and scales to meet evolving organizational and employee needs.
SEAMLESS
A seamless solution provides consistent experiences across all touchpoints and smooth transitions between services, eliminating barriers that can frustrate both customers and employees. “They can go from a web interface, from email, into voice, into chat, back to voice, depending on what they need,” Paiz said. A unified platform also enables agents to understand the customer, anticipate their needs, and proactively adapt to their journey via a single pane of glass, whereas previously a customer might have been shuffled between disparate communication tools with little context.
SECURE
An appropriately secure solution maintains data integrity with FedRAMP-authorized tools and protects privacy at every step. “Everything we do, we ensure that it is with the highest level of security to safeguard that person's questions, their answers, their personally identifiable information (PII), so that security is one less concern they have as they're interacting with their government,” Paiz said.
To support these requirements, the TXM framework is built around
three pillars: optimized operations, team mobilization, and FedRAMP authorized technology.
Top qualities of optimal customer experience
Optimized operations deliver features like robotic process automation (RPA) and workflow management to simplify processes and streamline services. RPA, for example, takes repetitive tasks off human agents’ plates, giving them more time to focus on complex, higher-level interactions and support.
Team mobilization features create a flexible, mission-aligned workforce empowered by tools like AI-enabled development and training. Government agency staffing needs can suddenly increase, often without warning, such as during a natural disaster. Scalable omnichannel tools and rapid onboarding and training capabilities enable agencies to effectively and rapidly scale to support these surges.
FedRAMP-authorized technologies ensure the secure delivery of omnichannel communications features, as well as data-driven insights and reporting. Maximus partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to leverage Amazon Connect as the foundation for TXM, bringing all the benefits of AWS’ secure cloud infrastructure.
This framework transforms the total experience, both for staff and customers, as the two are intrinsically connected. When employees are empowered to fulfill their responsibilities with greater efficiency and ease, they deliver more positive customer experiences. And when customers are satisfied, employee experience improves. The key to fueling a continuous improvement loop for both sides is continuous innovation.
“We are road mapping what innovative technologies we see to enhance the customer and employee experience, and there are a lot of new, exciting things from an AI perspective,” Paiz said. “While we are focusing on the customer experience, we’re also seeing a lot of innovation from our government technology teams, ensuring they have the tools they need to enhance the caller’s experience — the most updated information, streamlined systems for interacting — and making sure that they have a good experience every day.”
