Welcome to part one of Adobe’s 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 users’ interests, the services and information citizens are seeking, and how to tailor content and omnichannel journeys to their needs — all while improving citizen experience (CX) operations.
As more government agencies adopt the tools to digitally transform, government overall is seeing gains in operational efficiency. But efficiency is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to transforming the citizen experience. To be truly successful, digital transformation must also empower government agencies to engage the public better and meet each citizen at their point of need.
Most agencies are still behind the curve
In 2018, the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA) called on chief information officers (CIOs) to make online services more user-centric by modernizing their websites, digitizing forms, using mobile-friendly design, applying data analytics, and other improvements. Despite this directive, customer satisfaction with the federal government reached “historic lows” in 2021, according to a 2022 report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF). The study shows most agencies are still behind in digital adoption and that they aren’t doing enough to measure and improve CX via their digital platforms.
“Per 21st Century IDEA, agency CIOs are expected to “[use] qualitative and quantitative data relating to the experience and satisfaction of customers, identify areas of concern that need improvement and improve the delivery of customer service. The need to expand on customer data collection and user research is a common theme across HISP CX Assessments, yet most — if not all — do not specify clear plans for accomplishing these activities with their digital services,” the ITIF report says.
Moving beyond the basics of digital government with analytics and personalization
To bridge the CX gap and improve customer satisfaction (CSAT), government agencies need better tools to help them capitalize on one resource that’s always in abundance — data.
Using analytics, agencies can gain deeper insights into behavioral data like how users are entering, navigating, engaging with, and exiting government websites. They can then use this data to create a unified profile of each citizen’s digital journey. When paired with the right metrics and personalization tools, this information can help agencies make strategic refinements to each user experience like showing content based on browsing history, arranging content more intuitively, geotargeting content, recommending relevant license or benefit application forms, and other customized actions.
Through data-driven personalization, agencies can more effectively deliver the right information to the right person on the right channel at the right time — across all services.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) and why they matter
Agencies that do measure digital CX effectively have at least two things in common — clearly defined KPIs and a unified strategy for managing them.
KPIs are designed to support meaningful data comparison. As a rule of thumb, agencies should define their KPIs as ratios, percentages, or rates rather than as raw numbers. While raw numbers are useful in analytics reporting, KPIs provide greater context, which makes them more powerful. For example, total page views is a helpful raw metric, but page views per visit is a powerful KPI.
Other common KPIs include form completion rate, form error rate, the average time to complete a form, downloads per visit, video completion rate, and average time spent on the site.
Once agencies set their KPIs, establishing KPI ownership helps create accountability throughout the organization. Successful agencies follow a top-down model that assigns four types of ownership roles, each at a different organizational level:
- KPI sponsor. This role is responsible for all journey-stage KPI targets. It’s often held by a branch chief or the equivalent.
- KPI owner. Typically an analytics manager, this person oversees daily KPI monitoring and reports on gaps and opportunities to the organization.
- Segment lead. Typically a lead analyst, this individual monitors segment KPIs daily and works with the KPI owner to prioritize specific parts of the UX.
- Functional teams. These teams execute on KPI findings and recommendations from segment leads and KPI owners tactically. They are commonly designers, content creators, and programmers.
The right organizational structure also matters
Agencies must also consider how they structure their experience-driven organizations. Adobe identifies three best-in-class organizational models that are ideal for managing and activating the customer journey:
- Center of excellence (COE). A concentrated team of subject-matter experts builds, disseminates, and standardizes a specific capability throughout the organization. It’s used to prove the value of a certain capability and allow it to be used consistently, properly, and at scale.
- Cross-experience team. A dedicated team focuses on improving the customer journey by coordinating internally with owners of different parts of the user experience. It’s used to deliver seamless journeys, shift focus from product-centric to customer-centric, eliminate siloed views of the customer experience, and inform decisions around changing the customer journey.
- Agile content teams. Cross-functional pods focus on discrete projects that support a large organizational objective. These teams operate using agile methodologies to publish and push content iteratively. This structure is used when an organization has an established tech stack and digital capabilities but wants to accelerate engagement.
While distinct, these structures can be used together to aid end-to-end transformation. Government agencies that want to evolve their organizational structure should consider how they can incorporate elements from all three.
Stories of success in government
These three federal agencies are successfully leveraging analytics, personalization, KPIs, and org structure to optimize their digital performance.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fights COVID-19 with analytics and personalized communication
The CDC uses analytics to improve content delivery for users of its website, CDC.gov. Leveraging Adobe Analytics to understand what users are doing online (and integrated with other analytics programs), the CDC can gain real-time data and insights to help streamline its health and safety information and make it more accessible to the public.
The CDC began making data accessible and interoperable by moving data in house and creating its own data lake. That meant reducing unnecessary data siloes that limited the agency from having full visibility into all usable data.
Channeling this data through a unified dashboard allowed the CDC to deploy a range of analytic tools to track different metrics for different use cases and combine them to understand the scope of the data in real time.
From there, domain-specific dashboards handled segmented audience metrics like customer behavior, how customers accessed the content, customer demographics, device types, and other information that offered visibility into what services the segmented audiences were seeking.
With the influx of data, teams had to think about which metrics and KPIs would be the most insightful. Good KPIs included the percentage of users visiting on mobile versus desktop, the percentage of return visitors versus single-visit users, and the percentage of visitors who were using the site’s search function. All of these offered insight into how easily users were finding the information they needed.
From there, the CDC knew how to best position the most in-demand information and design the customer journey to accommodate that. In cases where users searched for content, left the website, and returned later, the CDC looked for possible root causes and opportunities to make that content more accessible.
