A data governance model for public trust in government
How digital experiences are being delivered today
Technology innovation and digital adoption have forced governments to meet users across more channels, apps, and screens. And the public expects those interactions to be relevant, accessible, and personalized.
In fact, a survey by Deloitte Digital and Adobe found that 80% of constituents are more likely to use government services that are personalized for them. Nearly 90% said they prefer to receive direct messaging from the government via their preferred channel or device.
Some of this is driven by modern customer expectations. But in other cases, it’s driven by the digital divide and how entire communities find, navigate, and comprehend online government information and services.
- 50% of state .gov websites offer no language translation options.
- 45% of federal websites are not mobile-friendly.
- The average American reads at an eighth grade level.
As governments offer more and more digital services, they are collecting more and more data. Applications that once required basic information like name, address, and Social Security number now tap into tax databases, school, and health records.
The public’s concern about how their personal data is being used and shared is also growing. A new survey from the Pew Research Center reports that 71% of the public are worried about how government uses their personal data, and nearly 80% believe they have little or no control over what government does with it.
To build trust, governments must address these challenges and provide their constituents with secure, relevant, and equitable experiences. This starts by building a strong data foundation and governance model that helps break down data silos, streamline data collection processes, and serve constituents more effectively.
Experience-driven government delivers personalized, proactive inclusion
Adobe has taken on this task through experience-driven government, a strategy that connects the right person to the right information and service at the right time in their journey — at scale. It’s the ability to have an impact in every single interaction with every individual customer across any channel. This creates seamless experiences for constituents, drives more efficient government operations that strengthen public trust and agency reputations, and saves millions of hours and taxpayer dollars.
When you picture the digital touchpoints between the government and the public, there are two major engagement layers — the push and the pull. In a pull scenario, the person goes to an agency website or app to look for information. Under a push scenario, an agency reaches out to a person through email, text, letter, or other notification. Those shared interactions are made possible by an important piece of the trust puzzle — the customer data platform.
The CDP connects operational data such as user consent, transaction data such as whether they have applied for Medicaid, unemployment, or a driver’s license, and behavioral data such as what they are looking for on the website and the nature of their interactions with the call center. These data sources are brought together to create a unified profile of that user — or an entire segment of the public — to power those individualized experiences.
Now, let’s explore the customer data platform in action.
Customer data platform for building citizen experiences
Organizations need to evolve the way they’re interacting with constituents through the kind of data they’re collecting. Personalization tactics should evolve to become more robust as citizen engagement — and data — increases throughout their lifecycle. This evolution runs through four stages: discover, engage, convert, and retain and grow.
There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than waiting for a response or status update on your application or service inquiry or having to repeat yourself every time you talk to a service representative. Capturing real-time data across every touchpoint allows you to proactively identify, react to, and resolve customer interactions quickly. Now imagine that experience trying to get childcare for your newborn or disaster relief after a wildfire destroyed your home. At each stage, organizations should be integrating more types of real-time data. For example, in the discovery stage it’s important to capture audience segments, behavioral data, and geographic locations. But once an agency reaches the retain and grow stage, they’ll need to collect much more sophisticated information like omnichannel transactional data, propensity scores, and loyalty data.
This depth of personalization requires a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of designing the customer experience, and the platform to explore it. That’s where Adobe Real-Time CDP comes in.
Real-Time CDP focuses on three key areas:
- Data collection. Bringing together all the data that’s relevant to the citizen and the personalized experience. This doesn’t mean all data, but rather any that could drive personalized interactions and help meet customer needs. This includes known data such as email, account associations, and authenticated profiles, as well as unknown data like behavioral events, device IDs, and first-party cookies. The result is a 360-degree view of the customer.
- Profile management. This is where organizations can better understand citizen identities and how all that data comes together. Adobe’s Experience Data Model (XDM) supports this by standardizing all data. That data can then be used to segment individuals in ways that make sense, even with broad categories like families and small-business owners. Then, agencies can tap into the Real-Time CDP’s AI and ML capabilities to scale these processes to work for every single interaction.
- Activation. With the data flowing and profiles understood, it’s time to take the segments and start to activate the experience. You can publish the most up-to-date real-time information the next time a customer visits the website or mobile app. Agencies can use this data in other ways, including feeding personalized prompts to call center agents to reduce call time, or personalizing emails based on most recent activity.
Putting trust at the center of every data decision
Governments must be proactive and think about trust from the beginning. It should be built into every data decision they make. But what does trust mean? It’s not just one thing or one measurement. Trust is the culmination of many different actions.
When it comes to trust, Adobe has been proactive in building Real-Time CDP and other products in Adobe Experience Platform with trust tools at the forefront. We’ve worked with analyst firms, agencies, and regulatory bodies to develop a framework that enables product teams to build with trust in mind.
Part of this framework comes as the five key principles that drive trust. These are:
- Consumer privacy. Personalize experiences based on constituents’ preferences while honoring and enforcing consent across the customer journey.
- Governance. Create a central hub for business, IT, and security organizations to define data usage policies, enforce them, and optimize data coming in and going out.
- Transparency. Conduct administrative-level audits for visibility and accountability of how constituents’ data is accessed, managed, and activated.
- Security. Protect constituents’ data across storage, movement, and access downstream through people, processes, and technology.
- Data minimization. Manage the lifecycle of consumer data from collection to activation and expiration with integrity and purpose.
These principles for data governance, privacy, and encryption with Real-Time CDP are table stakes. We’ve done the work to enable agencies to comply with different policies and build trust by assuring citizens that the data government uses to give them a personalized experience is safe and protected.
For example, our data usage and labeling framework provides an opportunity to label data at the beginning of data ingestion and then enforce that policy through the entire workflow as it streams to social media, personalization engines, email, or wherever it needs to be.
With Real-Time CDP, agencies can easily allow citizens to request access, delete, or update their data as new regulations are implemented. This feature was critical for agencies when the California Consumer Privacy Act transitioned to the updated regulations under the California Privacy Rights Act in 2020. Our privacy service was ready to manage that switch for our customers.
How to get started
Adobe can help governments and their agencies build trust with the public and offer every individual the most inclusive, accessible, and personalized experience possible.
As you get started, keep these three key takeaways in mind:
- Trust is critical to personalization — collect and enrich citizen profiles with attributes tied to preferences.
- Build trust principles into citizen and constituent experiences — proactively, not as an afterthought.
- Consider solutions with functionality built in to enable you to manage and automate governance.
View our recent webinar to learn how you can put data governance, security, privacy and transparency into action.
https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3425590
Learn more about how Adobe Government Solutions are helping agencies deliver experience-driven government.
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