Citizen Digital Series: What Customers Want From Digital Government Services, With Chris Neff

When it comes to the digital services of U.S. local and state governments as well as the federal government, what do customers expect and need? What are the gaps that digital government services need to bridge to improve customer satisfaction? Eric spoke with Chris Neff, vice president of marketing and research at Tyler Technologies, an international provider of digital and mobile services for government. Neff describes how Tyler Technologies engages with members of the public, how it assists the public sector with customer research, and what customers are looking for from the digital government services they use.

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Eric Egan: Hi everyone. Welcome to Citizen Digital, an ITIF web series where I speak with experts in the United States and around the world to explore how digital technology can improve citizen and customer experience. My name is Eric Egan. I'm the policy fellow for digital government at ITIF. And joining me today is Chris Neff, vice president of sales enablement at Tyler Technologies software provider for public sector clients in the United States. Chris, thanks for joining.

Chris Neff: Thanks, Eric. It's great to be here.

Eric Egan: So I thought before we jump into the conversation and some of the questions I have, maybe just a minute or two about yourself and how you kind of came to work in this space.

Chris Neff: Sure. My background's actually in consumer marketing. I came from the Coca-Cola company, and prior to that, with MCI. And I focused on brand management and consumer marketing. And I sometimes like to say I survived the cola wars and the long distance wars. And in 2000 I was invited to come to NIC, which was acquired by Tyler a couple of years ago, but I was brought to NIC to really bring a branding sensibility to what was then nascent e-government, and have been working in various functions through strategic communications marketing, engaging users, selling now for 23 years.

Eric Egan: Wow. Yeah. So you'll be able to... I'm curious for kind of our opening standard question on this web series, kind of given your background in the private sector. So I'm curious if you can walk us through your definition of citizen or customer experience with government. And the role, particularly as a digital kind of focus in this show and the role you feel digital technology plays in that experience.

Chris Neff: Sure. And a lot of your guests, Eric, have talked about it in different flavors, and I think I have a similar view, but it's really to the point I believe that the citizen experience is enabling a constituent to get in, find the information they need, take care of their business, and get out and get on with their day. We've conducted thousands of interviews, focus groups, and surveys with citizens around the country for going on two decades now. I have never, and I don't use absolutes a lot, I have never encountered a citizen who said, "I like to just spend time on government websites looking around. I'm on a journey of discovery and I've got time to kill." It just doesn't happen. It is an entirely transactional experience. So the focus of that experience is guide the citizen to where they need to go as efficiently as possible, provide them with those steps like a concierge would of how to get the work done, be very clear about what the output is, and then let them go.

Confirm the work, and they're off to the races. That's our point of view of what the citizen experience should be.

Eric Egan: Government websites aren't Instagram. So I know Tyler Technology works with a lot of really government clients at every level, federal, state, local across the US. Are there any specific examples you could share regarding the kind of work some of these agencies are doing and the digital initiatives that they might be engaged in that really focus on enhancing customer experience specifically?

Chris Neff: Absolutely. Tyler's got 18,000 installations, so I'll spare you going through all 18,000. That probably will run us a bit long. But let me give you a few, one of which is in West Virginia, which is pioneering the use of digital vehicle titles, the process of actually securing and confirming the ownership of car. And the challenge with that is it's primarily a paper-based solution,. And you have dealers, you have the government, and you have the buyers and sellers. So the citizens who are caught up in a process that historically has taken weeks or sometimes months... There were instances in the news toward the end of last year where a well-known digital vehicle seller could not produce titles to cars and people could not actually claim ownership of vehicles because the process was so challenging. West Virginia has solved that problem with a very capable subcontractor that we work with.

And so now, we are able, on an end-to-end basis, within a matter of days, secure a digital title that then could be transferred to any state in the country. So gone are the days of a citizen waiting to know if... Do they own a car or not? Do they have the title for something that they purchased? It can be validated by the state of West Virginia, and then can be approved and used in any state. So it's going to turn into this national vehicle titling clearinghouse that... We're hearing car dealers want it, buyers want it, sellers want it, banks want it. It's an exciting solution. So that's one example. Another example that's really straightforward is how we're using, whether it is to help businesses establish themselves, continue to operate, grow, and being able to consolidate all the requirements of dozens of different agencies so that you're filling out one online form. You're not being asked the same question 15 different times. The information and the requirements are centralized. You're being guided through that process with very easy user-based solutions, and then you're on your way.

And these are two examples from the business community, but there are hundreds from citizens as well, where we are taking what were previously either onerous or broken processes, or things that just simply didn't work really well offline, and we're moving them online. A case in Maine that we... We've had this service for 20 plus years. The process of registering your vehicle in the state of Maine is a two-step process. You have to do it with the state, and you also have to pay an excise tax with your municipality. That often involved a full day of driving pieces of paper and cutting checks at different offices. We're able to just combine those two into two screens, five minutes. You're paid, you're done, you've moved on with your day.

Eric Egan: You hit on this earlier as well in terms of Tyler's work on kind of performing citizen center and customer research for a long time now. I'm curious, so what do those efforts look like in terms of how... How did you engage members of the public? What was the kind of process there?

Chris Neff: Sure. Well, we do it big and small because it's important that... My point of view is research is always happening, whether you are commissioning a national study running focus groups in a single market or regionally, or you're conducting side-by-side user testing with a solution that's either brand new or you've innovated it and you want to... As Jen Pahlka said on one of your previous episodes, you want to go outside the building to actually get a real user's input, not a proxy user, or not someone who's still within government and kind of has that inside baseball perspective, but someone who's coming at it clean and cold. And sitting there and watching them asking, "What are you doing? Why did you do that? Why did this prompt cause you to think this way? Is there a word or a phrase that would help make this clear? Could you use use live help right here? Could you use a glossary to understand, or could you use breadcrumbs to see what the process is?"

Our perspective at Tyler is there's always something to be learned by talking to people who are consuming the services, and just as much as there is something to be learned by the business decision makers and leaders and those folks who are in the government trenches who are provisioning those services based upon the statutes and their requirements. We try to help bridge the gap between those two. So to answer your question in a somewhat long-winded way, we're doing everything from big national surveys all the way down to we've got a new service rolling out next week in Iowa and we need to get some eyes on it to understand what are the potential challenges here.

Eric Egan: Yeah, you hit on a few things that resonate in my own experiences working with government clients. And I think one of the challenges when I was on the vendor side and working with what's... Even though there's a lot of, especially in the private sector, but a lot of folks understand the value of user research, and as you say, getting outside the building and actually engaging in who truly the users are of government digital services. But at least in my experience, it was still not as common like true user research is, as you would want it to be in the public sector. Were there ways that you could kind of convince or work with your clients to incorporate this important step? You mentioned national surveys and different ways that you're going about this.

Was part of it kind of already having that information and bringing it maybe on an existing initiative or existing project, or was it kind of working with your clients to demonstrate, "Hey, for this particular service that we're helping you build out, we need to engage. We need to get outside the building. Before we even start development, we need to do discovery. We need to understand what these customers are going through?" One example I always refer to, when we had... For years, I was on a project. And you have things. You're able to measure things without interacting with users directly, like abandonment rate, and you can use analytics and figure out some things that are happening. But it wasn't until a user research team went out to the county offices and sat with them, they realized a lot of the customers of this particular service didn't know what the term upload meant. And that's something that's so easy to take for granted.

But until you're there and seeing people engage in that, you just don't know. So I'm curious how you demonstrate that value, how you convince particularly government clients who are hesitant to kind of get out into the field and kind of show the dirty laundry and in terms of how they build out software.

Chris Neff: Right. Well, I think the short answer is all of the above. We have the benefit of years of doing this, so we can leverage case studies, lessons learned, what peer agencies in other states have done, and to be able to bring that data to bear. So in some instances it may not be absolutely necessary to go, as we're saying, outside the building because there's a preponderance of evidence of this is the same service that's launched in 14 other states and here's what we've learned, and let's be sure that we implement those. Now, having said that, I've actually not encountered government decision makers, leaders, business line officials who are opposed to conducting the research. It's not a matter of they don't want to do it. It's often a bandwidth or resource issue. And that's something that Tyler can bring to bear and say, "We'll help run this for you. We'll set up the focus groups. You can sit on the other side of the one way mirror. We'll work with you on the questions and the discussion guide, and then we'll manage what those outputs are to figure out where those learnings are."

And they're fascinating. Every piece of research that we conduct, even if it validates everything that we already know, we're still learning things and we're still getting ideas for how to continue to innovate and evolve solutions and how to better serve citizens. And that's the fun part of the job. And I feel like that's where our public private partnerships with government really soar, is when we're working toward a shared goal and we're seeing the impact on citizens because we're asking the right questions and we're learning how to best serve them. And Eric, you also talked about data and looking at what's actually happening with these solutions, and I think that's a really important point. One of the organizations that Tyler has under its umbrella is called Data and Insights. It's formerly the company known as Socrata, which does an amazing job of synthesizing and visualizing data. But there's a tremendous amount that you can learn by obviously looking at your traffic, your abandoned rates, your transactions, your failed transactions, where are people going or not going, what sorts of content are they consuming or not consuming?

And then take it a step further. And how tightly integrated are you with the service layer to understand what are the keywords of people who are having trouble, what are the types of tickets that are coming through, what are your chat bots seeing in terms of inquiries? Because all of those are guideposts that can lead you to additional insight. It's alchemy a bit to sort of piece together all the different data points and inputs to get to, aha, here's something we can do to continue to improve a solution to make it better for citizens.

Eric Egan: Really tapping into the full arsenal of tools there then.

Chris Neff: Yes, exactly.

Eric Egan: So I want to ask, I know we had talked about this before, but in terms of, after all of this we researched that Tyler has performed over the years, are there any three to five kind of fundamental takeaways, some common denominators that you see, particularly when we're talking about what citizens and customers in government digital services are looking for You hit on one of them, which is kind of, I need to get in here, I need to get out. But any others that our listeners audience might maybe even be surprised that, or some that they just really need to keep kind of as pole stars in terms of... Yeah.

Chris Neff: Right. Yes. And I'm going to look away because I actually wrote some of them down. I want to be sure that I get them right because we've got a lot of data points. But the one that we have been seeing recently state after state is about stress levels. And right now nationally, 54% of the respondents ages 18 and above that we're surveying are saying that they find that dealing with government is stressful. Now, that's interesting in and of itself, but what does that mean, and why is it stressful? So now, we are embarking on the next layer of the research to understand, is it because the expectations of what an interaction are unclear? Is it because you don't know where to go and what level of government does what? Is it because the requirements, the information you have to have the payment process, the confirmation is unclear?

Is it because due to say your generation, you have very little experience dealing with government in the first place and you could use some training wheels, you could use better guideposts, better indications that you're on the right path, the way to take care of this transaction and what the outcome is looks like this, don't stress about it? So we're understanding that 54% is meaningful, but we really want to better understand, where do we go with that to continue to improve? Now, on the young adult side, we've conducted some separate research where we're talking to Gen Z and millennials, so in the ages 18 to just getting into their forties, and asking them how well they understand what government does. And we're getting 61 to 65%, depending upon the state, don't know how government is structured, don't know which level of government provides a specific service. And more to the point, they don't care, nor should they have to care. Government should be able to present that information in a logical way, regardless of the structure, the barriers, the ways that things have to happen.

In addition, I'm also surprised by the fact that we're still working toward this idea of a single government solution where, again, federal county, local city, municipality, state presenting services communally, whether they are still operating in their separate silos, which will likely continue to happen for a very long time because of the way that government is structured, the way that trust is engendered, the way that data is protected, the challenge is, and the opportunity is how do we work around that? How do we use things like APIs in order to link services in a way that, above the surface, to a citizen is very logical and easy, but below the surface, it's kind of like a duck paddling, there's chaos down there, but they're gliding along the surface and it's providing that really smooth user experience? And the data there is pretty clear. We have 65% of adults saying, "I want one place to go for all government. I want government capital G."

And then 50% are also saying, "I want a single way to validate and log in so that I'm me." So it's you Eric. I know you regardless of whether you're dealing with the county or the city or the state or the federal government, and I'll be able to surface the services that you need or that use it on a regular basis so that you no longer have what we call the scavenger hunt of where do I go to find what I need to do. So that's just a few of the data points. The one that I'm really focusing on, especially when we're talking about serving all citizens, is this concept of training wheels or additional supports for people who may not be as familiar or comfortable with government. It doesn't just apply to age, but it also applies to language, and it applies to recency in the country or familiarity with the community that you're living in.

So it factors into the ability to translate, the ability to simplify forms, the ability to provide step-by-step instructions. There's a lot of great places to go, continue to improve how these services are delivered, and research is helping drive that for us.

Eric Egan: Yeah, there's so many interesting things here. You've mentioned some of my past episodes, and with some of my guests, we've talked about government's compulsion to structure their digital services to be like, "Our customers need to know how we're organized." They don't really... They don't care about the legal department or how procurement happens or anything that's happening behind the scenes. To your point, they just want to get the service. And if you look at other services around the world, as you mentioned, the federated structure of the United States can complicate ease of access to digital services because of the silos. But there are ways around that without saying, "Well, we should just all consolidate this into..." That's unlikely to happen, but technology can really support that, as you're saying, with data sharing and things like that. So even if it's federated and structured and siloed in separate ways behind the scenes, it's still feels more united, which is something I think customers are certainly looking for. So that's really interesting.

Chris Neff: I have one more too.

Eric Egan: Go for it.

Chris Neff: And it's not necessarily a data point, but it's something that we've been reading about and we're thinking seriously about into the future. I'm reading this amazing book called Smart Brevity by the guys, some of the leaders at Axios. And the title says it all, but they're talking all about just this preponderance of words and content in the world versus our ability as citizens, and as consumers, to consume it, to be interested in it, to take advantage of it. And the data points at the very front of the book, they're saying it takes 26 seconds for someone to read a piece of content. No matter what the length is, they're going to stop at about 26 seconds or less. People give websites roughly 15 seconds max before they take action, usually abandon, and 17 milliseconds from the time you're exposed to a website or piece of content that your brain says, either I like this or I don't like this.

And so when you think about some of the opportunities that government has where we're dealing with statutes that in many instances are decades or centuries old, and we're dealing with forms that maybe were created eons ago that may or may not be asking for information that is no longer relevant, or where entire policies are posted on a website when it's just not necessary, I think there's going to be great reckoning of how do we streamline content, how do we continue to cut down what is out there so that we... Again, if you want people to get in, get out with their lives, they're not going to read a treatise on how to renew their driver's license. They'd like three steps in a credit card field.

Eric Egan: Yeah. So true. Again, as I mentioned, one of my previous guests had worked on, or at least around gov.uk, and that they're... The government digital service there in the UK has been really, really thoughtful in terms of how they've designed the website, which some people have called basic and kind of overly simple, but that is by design. It's not flashy, it's minimal word, and it's... Because exactly, when you're talking about... You're talking about interacting with government services, not Instagram, so it's simple, being able to get to the point, both in how the way it looks and in terms of content is really, really important. And a lot of people don't realize such a big part of just how a website is designed in the government is so much debate and coordination with legal teams and all of this for a single phrase. And so I'm happy to see that it's trending towards can we work through this into a way where it's simpler and it's not having to put just kind of cover ourselves so that everything is on the page so we're not sued or that kind of thing.

Chris Neff: And it's an opportunity for research and for the usability experts to be more involved upstream in that process, to be able to say, "Here's what a citizen is going to see and how they're going to interpret this. And the action that they're likely going to take is to bail, or they're going to pick up the phone and call customer service and add to a call queue that we should be able to self-serve through this digital channel. Let's put our heads together and figure out ways to simplify and streamline."

Eric Egan: Yeah. For sure. I know we only have a few minutes left, so I did want to ask you—Tyler is obviously well-versed in public sector procurement. It's the experience I myself am well versed in. Do you see any opportunities to kind of improve or modernize what's notoriously a burdensome process? Not just at the federal level, but for me working primarily at the state level, also very burdensome, especially as government agencies are looking to adopt kind of agile methods, they're looking to develop faster and do things quickly so that they can respond faster to customer needs and deliver software products that are better and faster. Any opportunities for improvement there?

Chris Neff: There are definitely opportunities. And the future's already happening, and we can be thankful to a consortium of companies, including Tyler, as well as NASPO, the state purchasing or procurement organization that is really leveraging cooperative contracting. And in particular, there are cooperative contracts through their value point operation that are focused on the citizen digital experience where you can leverage an existing procurement that a lead state has already gone out to competitive bid for, and you can sign a participating addendum and be able to negotiate with a list of pre-approved vendors, Tyler is one of them, for several of those categories where you can get web website solutions, you can get online services, payment processing, citizen engagement tools, data and insights so that you can analyze what's going on with your performance.

All of those are available without needing to go out to procurement, and you're really leveraging the work that's already been done by successful states. And in this instance, the state of Utah is actually the contracting entity in other states now. And I believe we have nine or 10 states that are already signing participating so that they can take advantage of the solutions that are already available without going through a lengthy procurement process. And last I saw, through some various sources, the typical state government procurement runs six to nine months in a fast tracked environment. So this allows you to get going in a matter of days or weeks.

Eric Egan: That's very good. Yeah. Okay, final question, maybe a happy note or optimistic note, but okay if it's not. In terms of what excites you about what's out there, digital experiences in government service delivery moving forward, generative AI, anything there, or maybe it's keeping things simple, what excites you or makes you nervous or concerns you moving forward?

Chris Neff: I'm excited about a bunch of things, one of which is that I feel like government gets a bad rep that's entirely undeserved with how they are managing digital government. And I put on my consumer hat and I think about when I was at Coca-Cola, we had hundreds or thousands of competitors in the beverage space. The opportunity, the total addressable market was massive, but our share of the business was often very small. Government share of government transactions and transacting is a hundred percent. It is a massive lift, and I think that it's unfair to penalize because you are serving everybody. Every single individual who lives within those boundaries is touching government and being served in some way or another. So I'm excited by the people that we work with every day across federal, state, and local government who are passionate and committed and are wanting to make positive change.

That's really exciting. We've got partners who are breathing the same air, and we're all drinking the same, so to speak, in a positive way. The other thing is, when I talked about the goal of really bringing government together and connecting it so that it knows that you are Eric Egan, they know where you live, they know what services you've consumed and are able to surface those to you. They're able to be predictive based upon life events. So let's say that there's a birth or a death or you're relocating, they're able to push information out to you. So here's the things that you need to take care of. I get excited about that. I also get excited when I look at, for example, Tyler's perspective on combining federal, state and local government because we have thousands of systems of record and we have all of this data, but it's not necessarily tied together to serve you, Eric, in the one Eric environment.

So what opportunities do we have in the future to be able to, again, leverage APIs, not combining all the data. That's not what we're looking at, but what we're looking at is to be able to bridge some of these gaps so that key information can be shared so that services can be predictive, and they can be more positive and easy, and again, eliminate the scavenger hunt, eliminate what I'd say it looks like spaghetti being thrown against the wall. When you think about, and I know you've relocated several times in your life, we've determined that relocating involves sometimes up to 18 to 25 discrete steps to reestablish your life in a new community, often touching four to six different government entities, three levels of government. That's a whole lot to take on where you're still unpacking boxes and trying to figure out which end is up. How can we present that so that you, Eric, are at the center of it and everything that you need is being pushed to you.

I get really excited about that. I think it's much closer than a lot of communities. The state of South Carolina is at the forefront of that right now. Colorado is right behind them. We're really excited to be able to deliver that true citizen-centric experience. And again, it'll be baby steps. We're big fans of pilots, as opposed to the massive grand unveiling. When it's iterative, you can continue to test and improve, add. Those are some of the things that... They don't keep me up at night, but they help me go to bed because I know good things are happening the next day.

Eric Egan: Yeah, that's an environment that would certainly make this Eric happier to interact with. Well, all right. I think that's all the time we have for this episode. I want to thank Chris again for joining us. And for our audience, don't forget to subscribe to ITIF on YouTube for other great videos and technology policy. And of course, stay tuned for more episodes of Citizen Digital. Bye now.