The following is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent Pocket Guide, Customer-Centric Digital Transformation: What You Need to Know. You can download the full guide here.
A great customer experience requires four key components. They need to be compelling. Personal. Useful. And they need to be available at every touchpoint. With these qualities, your agency can create a real connection with your customers, which enables improved transparency and builds trust.
Compelling
Citizens who communicate online have constantly evolving needs and expect relevant, even personalized, content from websites. There is no one definition for compelling content, but generally compelling means your content is relevant, inspiring, accessible, trustworthy and intriguing. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to know if your content is truly compelling to your citizens is that they are motivated to share it with others. To engage citizens, it is critical that public agencies quickly identify what content is relevant and compelling to them – which can be measured by bounce rates, time spent on page and shares on social, among other metrics. Armed with this knowledge through website tracking and testing, agencies need to continually evolve their sites and target the appropriate content to different citizens.
Personal
To engage your customers along every step of their journey, you must know exactly how they are interacting with your content. So, you need to collect and analyze a lot of data. With these insights you can test and fine-tune content continually so it’s always personalized and relevant. When you understand the makeup of your audience, you can deliver targeted content based on common characteristics like frequent visitors or citizens of a particular age group.
Useful
The content must be the exact information the citizen is looking for in the time and the place that they need it, and it must be information that can help them achieve whatever goal they had in mind when they started interacting with your digital platforms. If a person came to your government’s site looking for a specific name or form, and left without that information even while taking in lots of other content, that interaction or content wasn’t necessarily of use to them.
Available at Every Touchpoint
As citizens move through their journeys with a government entity, what are relevant changes at every step? It is all about context. Here is where analytics can really help, since citizens’ digital actions can be analyzed and translated into behavior patterns. Location- based services can provide relevant context as well. And, most importantly, single transactions must be accessible across all channels available to customers. For instance, they might start the transaction on a phone, continue it on a tablet or laptop and finish it on a desktop. All channels must work.
