The Digital Government Strategy shifts into high gear this week as it hits several important milestones, including the posting of guidance on performance and customer satisfaction metrics on Howto.gov.
The strategy calls for agencies to “implement performance and customer satisfaction measuring tools on all .gov websites.” Doing so will give us an unprecedented way to measure how we’re doing across the entire federal web space, and make sure we’re giving our customers what they want–anywhere, any time, any place.
I’ve seen the power of metrics first-hand from my work on NASA.gov, and during my detail with the .gov Reform Task Force. At NASA.gov, we just shattered pretty much every record on our books with the recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars.
But as great as it is to brag about the numbers (and show the worth of online communications to management), there’s a greater underlying value. These metrics show that we can deliver to huge audiences without crashing the site, and they set benchmarks for planning the next big event. Conversely, if we’d seen a huge performance drop-off during the event, we would’ve started working to pinpoint what happened.
Developing the guidance has also been a great example of cross-agency collaboration, where we’ve brought together folks like Ann Poritzky at DHS, Ilene France of NIH, Marina Tuttle of GSA and other active contributors from the Federal web metrics community to develop a common approach to federal digital metrics. Fortunately, there are a lot of people in government who are passionate about making this happen, and they’re excited about rolling up their sleeves and moving toward implementation.
Various metrics reports show the traffic spikes to NASA.gov during Curiosity’s landing on Mars.
Collecting and analyzing common metrics isn’t just good for agencies, it’s good for the public, too. When we go beyond the sheer tonnage of hits, page views and user sessions, we can start to find out what our customers are looking for, and whether we’re delivering.
Robust metrics can tell us:
- Where our users are coming from
- What they’re searching for
- Whether they followed the paths we expected
We can see what operating systems and browsers they’re using and whether they’re on a mobile device. As we all strive to innovate more with less, this data is crucial for making decisions and prioritizing where to improve.
Listening to the Voice of the Customer
A box on the NASA.gov homepage shows the most viewed feature stories, images and videos.
Today’s metrics tools are powerful, but it’s just as important to connect directly with the public. At NASA.gov, we measure customer satisfaction by looking at formal survey data, monitoring popular search terms and simply reading user emails. Virtually every update to the site in my nine years with NASA has been prompted by this kind of user feedback.
We find out what our audience wants, make the change, then measure again to see if we were successful. And we repeat as necessary.
We’re also working to get citizens more engaged by sharing some customer feedback with our whole audience. All NASA.gov videos and many feature stories include user comments, and we showcase our most popular stories, images and videos.
The agency strategy also includes a “people who read this also read …” feature to help get our users to the content they want. This may not fit a traditional definition of “metrics,” but we’re taking customer feedback and using it to help us build the site.
Pulling together data from across government could give us — for the first time ever — a real picture of how we’re delivering digital government services, identifying both areas for improvement and models for success. Measuring performance and customer satisfaction is the only way we can know if we’re truly delivering on the taxpayers’ investment. And after all, isn’t that the point?
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HowTo.gov — Customer Experience
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9 comments
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September 10, 2012 at 9:18 pm (UTC -5 )
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Erotik seks hikayesi oku says:
September 8, 2012 at 12:46 pm (UTC -5 )
Than you. Good very good.
Mohammad Abubakar says:
September 5, 2012 at 12:54 am (UTC -5 )
This is really awesome…. thanks a lot
pool online says:
September 4, 2012 at 1:33 pm (UTC -5 )
“Listening to the Voice of the Customer” This line it’s super important ! If you listen to your customer they will remain faitfull to your brand! (offcourse if the that particular brandcompany provides quality services! I allways enjoy good customer service btw!
Gonca Oyunları says:
September 3, 2012 at 3:33 am (UTC -5 )
Thank you for this.
Sua chua may tinh says:
September 2, 2012 at 6:04 am (UTC -5 )
I agree with the comments of Jan Erturk.With the current situation interacting with the social network is very important.
steel says:
August 31, 2012 at 9:51 pm (UTC -5 )
Using a data and table can intuitively obvious show the performance and customer satisfaction metrics, which can know which side should be efforts towards.
demi says:
August 30, 2012 at 7:32 am (UTC -5 )
thank you for sharing The Digital Government Strategy shifts into high gear this week as it hits several important milestones, including the posting of guidance on performance and customer satisfaction metrics on Howto.gov.
Jan Erturk says:
August 24, 2012 at 5:45 pm (UTC -5 )
Customer analytics need every web site, because they are use and read your contect. Do not forget, content is King! Video, photo must be easy shareable (i.e facebook, twitter.)
howtomobile » Digital Government Strategy Milestones Report says:
August 24, 2012 at 8:25 am (UTC -5 )
[...] Tools – to enable data-driven decisions on service performance, Milestone Action #8.2. Read Jim Wilson’s Meeting the Metrics Milestone blog about how NASA’s working on this [...]
Digital Government Strategy Milestones Report » blog.howto.gov says:
August 24, 2012 at 7:52 am (UTC -5 )
[...] « Meeting the Metrics Milestone [...]