Welcome to part two of our two-part blog on our recent webinar series, “Moving Beyond the Basics of Digital Government with Analytics & Personalization.” Here, we explore how agencies are using Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to learn more about the future of customer insights from the private and the public sector and how to make insights from multiple data sources available to the frontline for immediate action.
There’s little argument that data will drive the future of citizen-facing services for government. But how to use that data to understand which services the public needs — and how to make them equitable and accessible — will be a matter of strategic importance.
While collecting, accessing, and sharing the data are critical to improving operational efficiency, it is equally important for you to use data to activate the customer experience (CX) in a tailored and personalized way. The challenge will be doing this amid a proliferation of data sources, online and offline channels, and devices.
You can no longer rely only on traditional metrics tied to website visits and app tracking. Instead, government must take a more holistic view of the customer journey to understand how a customer (citizen or resident) arrives at and interacts with the websites they visit and the communications they receive. This requires looking at the customer’s behavior over time and across all the channels and devices they use.
Building a cross-channel strategy
The public expects their online experience to be ubiquitous — to be able to access online services anywhere, on any device, and at any time. For this reason, you must develop a data strategy that considers how they engage with services across all channels. The customer experience rarely happens in a silo.
Today, the typical customer journey spans multiple channels and sessions. A customer may begin a session on a laptop but continue it later on a mobile device. They may revisit the site multiple times and perform different actions on different visits. Often, they may start completing a form but return to finish it later. They may call a contact center multiple times to ensure decisive action has been taken.
No matter which devices or channels the public uses or how many times they visit, customers have come to expect a seamless experience where their previous activity is remembered and information is consistent and readily accessible each time.
This device-agnostic outlook requires you to rethink how the customer defines each experience and the analytics you use to measure it. Reaching customers and making content accessible won’t work with a catch-all CX strategy. Instead, you need to examine the customer experience through a cross-channel lens.
That means combining behavior and operational data from all touchpoints and channels to gain insights from the total experience. Then, use those insights to optimize the journey for each customer.
You can kick this off by understanding what information matters to your customer and what their journey to that information looks like. With analytics and personalization tools, you can gain insight into how different customer segments behave online, where they are engaged, and how to arrange that content for an optimized experience.
By understanding customer interactions, you can reinforce and expand the CX by tailoring content to the individual’s interest and continuing to deliver it through notifications to mobile applications.
The evolution of analytics in government
Shift to journey-centric analysis
As the user experience now spans devices and applications, you will have to question whether the current analytics tell the whole story. Because while session times and page views were the original coin of the realm, they fail to capture how and why citizens do what they do and what they want.
Instead, you must upgrade your analytics to explore every touchpoint throughout the user journey. They should be analyzing questions like these — where are users entering the website, and where are they navigating from? At what point in the journey do they tend to drop off the site, and do they come back? How are different audience segments performing, and how do they perform over time?
All these factors can paint a broader picture of how customers are behaving across channels and inform how to engage them at different points in their journey. Shifting to journey-centric helps eliminate disjointed reporting and produces a single source of truth for your entire organization.
Put privacy first
Increasingly, privacy is paramount to a user-centered experience. New data regulations and policies make it critical for agencies to use data responsibly. Adopting analytics tools and privacy workflows, such as labeling sensitive data and enforcing privacy policies, can help agencies stay compliant while ensuring their data remains an asset to your organization.
Build data integrations for better decisioning
Analytics tools are most effective when they can provide insights across all data from all sources — not just their own. Adobe’s interoperability with other analytics tools makes it a key differentiator in the marketplace because it can integrate with other applications and augment their data to help build out a solid analytic environment for better decision-making and activate a user experience in real time.
Democratize data
Analytics will need to evolve to allow anyone within your organization to use data to make decisions. This requires analytics tools built for both the analyst and the non-analyst, so users in any role can become citizen data scientists.
By design, Adobe Analytics empowers users at all levels to derive and share data insights across teams. The learning curve is eliminated by providing an intuitive interface and quick access to curated dashboards. These tools simultaneously strengthen governance with role-based access, which lets you assign data permissions based on users’ roles and needs. This makes it easier for users to work with data relevant to them while keeping data protected.
How the US Census Bureau went digital
Perhaps one of the best examples of a large-scale analytics and personalization effort was the 2020 Census. The 2020 Census marked the first time the Census Bureau used digital tools to analyze online and offline behavior to get a full picture of the customer journey and deliver the largest digital transformation project in US history.
In generating opportunities for citizen engagement, the bureau used analytics to listen continuously for changing customer data to personalize and segment different audience populations.
The bureau was able to use those insights to align with outreach strategies across channels to engage different populations in their preferred channel (i.e., web, social, email, SMS).
With personalization and segmentation channels identified, the bureau pushed out more relevant and tailored content to those channels to raise awareness of how to participate in the 2020 Census online.
By monitoring which ads went to which segments, the Census Bureau had awareness of where engagement was most effective. As a result, citizen engagement online outpaced its projected targets as the personalized ad campaigns remained remarkably effective.