feedback
Service Design
quarterly-update
High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) continue to deliver critical public services and collect customer feedback regarding those services in order to inform operational adjustments and assess performance.
Each quarter, agencies report customer feedback results to OMB.
The data is subsequently published on
this website.
In FY 21 Q4 (July 1 – September 30, 2021), HISPs received more than 550,000 customer feedback survey responses. HISPs reported serving 220,000,000 customers in Q4, which is down more than 30% from Q3.
A large part of this is due to the fact that the FY21 Q4 data does not currently include data from HHS Marketplace.
Apart from the data gap, the decrease in visits tracks with a seasonal ebb of responses.
Satisfaction scores decreased to from 4.2 to 3.80 out of 5.
Trust scores decreased slightly from from 3.78 to 3.75.
Sporadic lack of availability to physical locations and online services,
and COVID related service needs and issues
were cited as possible reasons for the decrease.
Developing a more nuanced understanding of services
Moving forward, the CX team at OMB, HISP community, and our Feedback Analytics team at GSA are working to better improve the quality and use of customer feedback data. Following both the signing of Executive Order 14058 in December 2021 and the Biden Harris administration’s first update to A-11 Section 280 in August 2021, HISPs will soon be refining and improving these public reports of their feedback data through the designation of specific service journeys of their customers. A key input to identifying priority customer pain points is better collecting and understanding both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback – thinking of CX data as a
strategic asset.
In addition to quantitative feedback outlined for post transaction surveys in Section 280, many agencies are incorporating open-ended feedback into their operations to provide more nuanced, subjective, and experiential feedback related to products and services.
Quantitative data provides an objective signal of a subjective experience. The 1.0 - 5.0 ratings help provide a baseline from which to work; a foundation for which to base a conversation. The open-ended feedback surveys can provide contextual qualitative data. The result is a more complete, nuanced picture; and feedback that is more human-centered.
Improving the feedback data reporting process itself
Service to a customer is typically the culmination of a value stream. Each rule, guideline, communication, and handoff in a service is an opportunity to add value and improve an experience, every interaction between the Federal government and the public is an opportunity to rebuild trust.
Our Feedback Analytics team at GSA reviewed the way in which HISPs provided quantitative data to OMB and GSA as required in A-11 Section 280.
The team has since worked to improve the user experience for the HISP staff reporting the data, incorporating user feedback into an updated reporting process – which we will continue to refine to make less laborious.
The original intake process entailed using spreadsheets and emailing them around for data entry and review, before files were submitted to an intranet site. For the Feedback Analytics team, analyzing the data entailed recombining the more than 20 spreadsheets before reporting on.
The updated process uses a basic web form, CRUD database, data validations, and an API (these are all commodities in a modern IT environment). The form intake was built in a few days and tested using the existing spreadsheet data collections, to ensure feature parity. By ensuring structured, validated data up-front, structured data became a natural byproduct of the data collection itself. APIs now provide staff programmatic access to Service Providers, Services, and Data Collections.
What works better now:
- The data collection process was re-designed with HISP staff users, so we got feedback earlier from the start. As a result, we were able to update the software tool to support the type of internal reviews HISP staff need to conduct before they formally submit.
- We’ve reduced room for our own errors transcribing spreadsheets into summary spreadsheets into .csvs.
We’re continuing to learn and improve our own internal processes, so that we can in turn deliver more meaningful, accountable data to the public. We look forward to sharing FY21 Q1 data soon!
