{
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    "title" : "Delivering seamless customer journeys |Digital.gov",
    "description": "Delivering seamless customer journeys",
    "home_page_url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/","feed_url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/2024/04/16/delivering-seamless-customer-journeys/index.json","item" : [
    {"title" :"Delivering seamless customer journeys","deck" : "Back-end coordination is key","summary" : "GSA shares a 4-step process used to measure and analyze related websites, and additional plans to improve customers’ digital experience.","date" : "2024-04-16T00:00:00Z","date_modified" : "2025-01-27T19:42:55-05:00","authors" : {"aaron-meyers" : "Aaron Meyers"},"topics" : {
        
            "analytics" : "Analytics",
            "customer-experience" : "Customer experience",
            "user-experience" : "User experience"
            },"branch" : "bc-archive-content-3",
      "filename" :"2024-04-15-delivering-seamless-customer-journeys.md",
      
      "filepath" :"news/2024/04/2024-04-15-delivering-seamless-customer-journeys.md",
      "filepathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/blob/bc-archive-content-3/content/news/2024/04/2024-04-15-delivering-seamless-customer-journeys.md",
      "editpathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/edit/bc-archive-content-3/content/news/2024/04/2024-04-15-delivering-seamless-customer-journeys.md","slug" : "delivering-seamless-customer-journeys","url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/2024/04/16/delivering-seamless-customer-journeys/","weight" : "1","content" :"\u003ch2 id=\"when-two-rivers-meet\"\u003eWhen two rivers meet\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLet’s do a little experiment. Visit two government websites on similar topics (for example, try \u003ca href=\"https://buy.gsa.gov/\"\u003ebuy.gsa.gov\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https://www.gsa.gov/buy-through-us\"\u003egsa.gov/buy\u003c/a\u003e). Do they look the same? Probably not.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a natural phenomenon that happens when you see two rivers meet. They’re both water, they’re at the same spot, they have the same people fishing right there, same fish, but where the water touches, you can see a seam that separates the two bodies of water.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), we’ve found that we have many websites that share a similar purpose, but just like those two rivers, they start in different places, they’re managed by different offices or programs, and as a result they look different. When it comes to customer experience, a seam between two related websites is a distraction that makes our websites harder to use than they should be.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, how can we make things seamless? GSA’s Office of Customer Experience decided to figure it out.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"4-steps-to-create-a-seamless-customer-journey\"\u003e4 steps to create a seamless customer journey\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"step-1-determine-the-services-offered\"\u003eStep 1. Determine the services offered\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Office of Customer Experience conducted a high-level content analysis on GSA’s 184 public-facing websites to determine the services each site offers. By coupling this analysis with a manual review of each website, we’ve identified 75 separate services that GSA offers to the public across all agency websites.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIs each website dedicated to a single service? No.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOf those 184 sites, 102 (57%) of them provide more than one service. Of that 102, 86 of them provide the same service as another site in that group, typically with a slight difference in scope. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but we do recognize that, to outside users, similar services are like those two rivers meeting in one spot, and it is GSA’s responsibility to make them flow together seamlessly.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"step-2-define-the-challenges\"\u003eStep 2. Define the challenges\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt would be a mistake to assume all website managers face the same challenges. Some of our websites support up to five different services, and it’s a complicated challenge to build a website that seamlessly serves multiple audiences, services, or customer needs.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnother complexity is in the realm of documentation and compliance burden. A single website manager could be operating nine different websites tied to 10 different services (a real example we uncovered in our research at GSA). Each federal website must comply with hundreds of federal requirements. That’s a lot of institutional knowledge, and a lot of documentation that a single person or team must maintain.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo complicate matters further, of the 75 services we identified at GSA, only 16 of them are supported by a single website dedicated to that purpose. In other words, of all the services GSA provides, more than half are carried out by people who work for different bosses in different reporting structures.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePairing our knowledge of website managers with human resources data, we dug in to figure out what the added cost of collaboration is for the people doing this work, right down to the supervisors, website managers, and content contributors that need to be on the same page. In some cases it’s an enormous challenge. The manager of a website marketing a GSA program might need to coordinate with 17 other sites, 12 other website managers, 11 GSA departments, and 5 other business lines.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"step-3-determine-common-metrics\"\u003eStep 3. Determine common metrics\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBack in October 2022, the Office of Customer Experience \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/2022/10/07/taking-a-design-led-approach-to-digital-modernization/\"\u003ewrote about measuring over 70 agency websites\u003c/a\u003e in the six areas of:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCustomer-centricity\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAccessibility\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePerformance\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eUser behavior\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eImplementation of \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/resources/required-web-content-and-links/\"\u003ehyperlinks required by policy and law\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eImplementation of the \u003ca href=\"https://designsystem.digital.gov/\"\u003eU.S. Web Design System\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe generated narrative reports, with visualizations that look like the following:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cimg src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/pie-chart-website-alignment-six-measurement-criteria.png\" width=\"400\" align=\"center\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach slice of this colorful “pie” represents one of the six categories above. The bigger the slice, the closer the website is to performing in an ideal manner, according to our methodology. Read more about how we use this methodology to \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/2024/04/16/determining-the-true-value-of-a-website-a-gsa-case-study/\"\u003edetermine the true value of a website\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA year later, we’ve reviewed 136 websites, and we’re reviewing the remaining sites this year to gain further insights from across our entire web portfolio.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe’ve learned that a small website about a single acquisition vehicle should probably not be evaluated in the same way as a site with the scope and size of, for example, our agency flagship website, GSA.gov. Grouping websites by services means that, at the very least, we consider similarities in customers when we compare measurements, which helps us begin to understand customers who are likely to visit more than one site as part of their journey.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"step-4-connect-people-with-data-they-can-act-on\"\u003eStep 4. Connect people with data they can act on\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRelated services are more likely to share common customers. They also represent a collective set of “deal breakers” when it comes to customer experience. If customers who are particularly sensitive to performance issues use two related sites, poor performance on website A will reflect poorly on website B, even if there are no performance issues on site B.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen people have a bad experience with one government website, it may impact their impression of every government website. Consequently, every government website manager is not just responsible for their own website performance. They own some responsibility for every bit of traffic they pass on to other government sites, as well as how their site’s performance reflects on the trust and performance of the entire federal government.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven when two sites are less likely to be in a single journey, if they offer a similar service, they are likely to ask the same fundamental questions, or provide similar functionality. It doesn’t matter if a site is about office supplies or lighthouses (two things GSA offers), both sites have to decide where and how to display products, present a price, and complete an online transaction. Each web team is asking similar questions. They need to learn from each other, to improve consistency in online interactions across the agency and the federal government.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-happens-next\"\u003eWhat happens next?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe know that seams exist between our websites. We know who is creating each site, and that they each know something about their customers. We also know that these teams are commonly not in the same office — and as a result, not talking to each other as often as they could.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere are the next steps in our quest to create a more seamless digital experience at GSA:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCompile our research by business line and service\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHost workshops on service categories to help managers look across their organizational silos and determine what’s required to develop sustained collaboration\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAnalyze the results of these conversations to learn how we can continue to refine our digital services\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe are seizing this opportunity.  As we unify website managers around their services and their customers, GSA’s digital ecosystem will no longer be separate “rivers” with offices flowing through them. Instead, we will be serving the people who are at the river to fish, boat, and have an enjoyable day.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-can-i-do-next\"\u003eWhat can I do next?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReview \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/resources/an-introduction-to-analytics/\"\u003ean introduction to analytics\u003c/a\u003e to learn more about measuring website effectiveness.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you work at a U.S. federal government agency, and would like to learn more about this work, reach out to GSA’s Office of Customer Experience at \u003ca href=\"mailto:customerexperience@gsa.gov\"\u003ecustomerexperience@gsa.gov\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n"}
  ]
}