Can CX Help USA Co.?

Being a CX professional and watching this year’s election process, I am dumbfounded at how out of touch our whole election process is and how badly the Federal Government services we constituents/customers. I seems to me that the participants in our current election reflect private sector company department heads who are siloed and fighting with very sharp elbows to keep their jobs; knocking others down while creating urgent problems that “only they” can fix in order to remain employed. Quite unproductive.

I will be publishing an article in an upcoming Customer Management IQ special edition on ways federal agencies can use CX to improve the service they offer us and that we pay for.

Outside of that article, I would like to explore with you how a best practice CX methodology could actually change our entire political system. Let’s open dialog on this…. who knows, maybe we can change the World.

Discussion assumptions:

1. We agree that in this discussion context, the US Government is a business, designed to serve and protect its citizens. It is in the business of people and provides services to help residents protect and advance their/our lives.
2. We do not include the regulatory branches of government in this ideation (eg. Supreme Court, SEC, FTC, etc.). We might consider these to be outsourced legal counsel.
3. Each federal agency such as the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration, and Housing and Urban Development are considered departments within USA Co. For example, HUD might be like a typical Facilities team, the VA might be like a security department, and the SSA might be akin to the retirement benefits offered by Human Resources.
4. Senators and Congress(wo)men are like regional sales people or account executives.
5. POTUS is the CEO of USA Co., VPOTUS is like the VP, Operations, and the Secretary of the Treasury is like any company’s CFO.

As a benchmarked metric, the American Customer Satisfaction Institute (ACSI) regularly publishes customer satisfaction scores from many industries, government included. In January 2012’s press release, Claes Fornell of ACSI says,

At present, the federal government is 5 points below the lowest-scoring private sector economic segment information at 72.3—an improvement over a 7-point gap in 2010. … While people generally distrust federal government as a whole, they are much more positive towards the job that individual agencies are performing. … The lack of trust has much more to do with politicians than it does with federal workers and the services of the federal government.

Not only do we have lower than cable company customer satisfaction scores at the federal agency levels (USA Co.’s operational departments) but we have a leadership crisis that is impeding the growth of USA Co. If USA Co. was on an analyst call, the analyst would be asking for USA Co.’s NPS scores or some indication of how committed they were to their customers in order to determine credit worthiness and stock guidance. I doubt any analyst would listen to campaign promises on these types of calls.

What are your thoughts on these questions?

1. If we treated USA Co. as an SEC-registered company, would we tax-paying citizens actually be shareholders with all of the power that goes with same or would we be customers buying a service?
2. If we were all shareholders, wouldn’t we be voting directly for USA Co. leadership; meaning that the Electoral College would be unnecessary?
3. If we were all customers buying a service – security, retirement services, etc. – are we thinking that we are a captive customer base instead of finding alternative vendors to provide the same services?
4. If we all believe that we have alternatives to choose from, whether moving to another country that works better for our goals or simply not using USA Co.’s services (vote with our wallets), what alternatives would we have? Should USA Co. be considered a monopoly? Should they give we customers the option to purchase the services that we wish to purchase and not others meaning that they need to be competitive and unbundle their services?
5. As customers or shareholders, should we require strong ethics and compliance adherence, just like other executives must comply to?
6. No matter if USA Co. had customers or shareholders, how would a CX strategy help them and us? Would it help focus everyone on the same goals, get paid for achieving goals, realign resources to focus on those same goals, and yield a better financial return overall? Likewise, would we customers start trusting USA Co. again and would customer satisfaction scores go up?
7. Could VoC programs and Sentiment Analysis replace Gallup polls and endless pundit guessing?
8. How could Touch Point mapping and analysis help?

The big question is…

If we all got serious about advancing our country and civilization in general, how would/could a CX strategy help?

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Looking forward to reading your ideas!!!

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As a disclaimer, I have no financial or business interests in USA Co.

© Mary Ann Markowicz