The United States Needs a Chief Experience Officer

When it comes to digital interactions and experiences, the bar has been set by Silicon Valley tech giants. You place an order on Amazon and it’s on your doorstep within 48-hours. You type a search query into Google and within seconds, you are served up several highly relevant results. As consumers, we have come to expect this level of convenience — even trading our autonomy for efficiency at times. As citizens, our experiences with government entities tend to be a bit different. At the local level, a trip to the DMV is regularly the butt of a joke. And at the federal level, the United States government is woefully behind the curve. Citizens spend billions of hours collectively filling out paperwork. Such interactions are often so painfully confusing, one feels as if they need a PhD in paperwork to accomplish the desired goal. There is a sense that a level of resignation has settled in; that this is just the way it is when it comes to interfacing with the bureaucracy across all levels of the government. But I believe that we can do better for our citizens. What the U.S. needs is a Chief Experience Officer.

Over the past two decades, the role of chief experience officer evolved out of the customer service space. In the past, when a customer had a negative experience with a product or an organization they would call the customer service line and, in theory, connect with an empathic fixer on the other end of the line. As the marketplace evolved and online experiences began to eclipse brick-and-mortar interactions, a focus on the customer experience commensurately became the purview of an organization’s chief experience officer. They became responsible for all the customer touchpoints across the ecosystem of interaction — in-person and digital, along with the experiences of employees, partners and vendors. Effectively, a chief experience officer is responsible for ensuring that any constituency served by an organization has a positive experience. It is no longer just about the person on the other end of the line.

Perhaps the most important aspect of a chief experience officer’s role is to understand the needs, goals, and frustrations of the various audiences an organization serves both inside and out. What will be most meaningful or valuable or for this constituency within the context of their lives? What is it that is really driving this constituency? What is the overarching context of a specific relationship or interaction? This framing can help organizations avoid knee-jerk reactions or superficial solutions to initial assumptions, which can oftentimes amount to putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. This approach is human-centered in nature and requires both quantitative and qualitative research to deeply understand the nuances of the people, the problems, and the opportunities at play. It involves working WITH people to create the kinds of experiences they will benefit from as opposed to doing so in a vacuum. The process serves as a creative framework for the ideation of new ideas which address both surface level challenges and core issues, enhancing satisfaction, and improving agreed upon outcomes. Ultimately, the goal of a chief experience officer is to determine what success looks like in the eyes of an organization’s various constituencies and to help the organization to execute on that vision.

The U.S. government is arguably a case study in what goes wrong when an organization doesn’t have a chief experience officer. Not unlike how the federal role of chief technology officer was fomented by the rise of the digital ecosystem, the current moment requires a chief experience officer to help the government adapt to the ever-changing landscape of interactions between citizens and the government and within government agencies themselves. The solutions to the pain points Americans experience on a regular basis will not be one-size fits all; ideally, someone is tasked with adapting policies and processes so the bureaucracy can more effectively meet citizens where they are — wherever that may be on a particular issue. If we can understand the citizen’s perspective from the get-go, we can design services with citizens that are more effective, fluid, and seamless. Just as we are seeing with participatory budgeting — wherein citizens weigh in on how budget dollars are spent — so too, can we better engage with citizens on how to be a more effective organization to work with. This can help put a focus on what is ultimately going to work best, for the greatest number of people.

If a business has a strategy that has at its foundation identifying and satisfying the needs of the people they serve, then that business is going to have brand enthusiasts. They’re going to win customers; they’re going to keep customers. And ultimately, they’re going to have longevity in the marketplace because it’s based on not just the short term, but the long-term view. So as I grew and developed Mad*Pow, the company I founded 20 years ago, we focused on helping organizations improve their digital experiences, improve their service experiences, and orient their business strategy in the direction of satisfying the needs of folks both inside and outside of their organization. In the process of that, I was chief experience officer for my organization. Over time, I basically became a chief experience officer for hire by working with leading organizations across various industries to help them to formulate strategies to tackle their goals, challenges, struggles and ultimately help them to improve experiences inside and out.

The government could aim to adopt a similar approach. At the end of the day, it is an organization that provides services to millions. If we looked at government services like we do corporate services and fundamentally upgraded the quality and the ease of use, we would be doing a lot better. A government’s services could be accessible, fluid, and intuitive and government employees should be able to collaborate and communicate effectively. If we can do this, then we can dedicate human time to being more hands-on with folks, walking with them through the experience and building a relationship — and trust — in the process. One of the things the chief experience officer does is craft a vision of what could be, which can involve futures thinking and its relationship to experience. What are the negative futures that we want to avoid? How do we work to prevent them? And then the bright part of this is: What is a preferred future? What does an American dream look like that could get people excited? What could be put in place in order to realize that? How might we reinvent the systems that effect our lives? Chief experience officers are tasked with creating these virtuous circles and situations that address all the needs and objectives of all the constituencies to produce good outcomes.

That is what this country needs.