How to Address the OMB’s Life Experiences Mandates and Improve Constituent Experience

The Biden administration has issued new mandates for federal agencies to prioritize and deliver enhanced government customer experience (CX) capabilities. These mandates provide a roadmap and an opportunity for agencies to leverage digital transformation efforts and modernize CX for their constituents.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has identified five projects to help improve these essential constituent life experiences:

• Approaching retirement

• Recovering from a disaster

• Transitioning from active military duty to civilian life

• Navigating birth and early childhood for low-income mothers and children

• Facing a financial shock and becoming eligible for critical support programs

These experiences often require interactions with multiple federal agencies, as well as with state, local, tribal and territorial governments. The goal is to design and deliver benefits, services and programs during these impactful moments in people’s lives. But for many agencies, the biggest challenge is determining how to get started on enhancing external CX capabilities.

The first step is to take advantage of innovations that enhance and streamline interdependent processes. This begins with expediting the migration from outdated technology infrastructure, implementing change management protocols and increasing the accountability of stakeholders who provide services to the government.

Of the five OMB focus areas, let’s look more closely at three that often find constituents needing immediate government support services: recovering from a disaster, navigating birth and early childhood for low-income mothers and children and facing a financial shock.

Recovering from a disaster

When helping constituents recover from a disaster, the goal is to ensure they’re not forced to navigate countless application forms for assistance across multiple agencies. Securely sharing information between government agencies helps streamline recovery efforts and allows constituents to focus on their well-being.

For example, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) streamlined many processes to expedite its distribution of $175 billion in grants to support families, workers and healthcare providers. HRSA was able to digitize its onboarding process and shorten its grant distribution efforts from four months to five days on average. 

Birth and early childhood for low-income mothers and children

Mobile innovations are critical for helping constituents meet critical birth and early childhood needs. For example, many of the processes required to access Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP), Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) benefits can be digitized to make them readily accessible, fillable and signable from virtually any mobile device.

Providing easy mobile access to services helps the federal government meet constituents where they are. Whether at home caring for their child or commuting with their newborn to a care provider’s office, mobile convenience reduces inequitable barriers to healthcare, food, housing, childcare and other resources.

Facing a financial shock

Quick action is essential for those experiencing a financial shock. The OMB has set bold and aspirational goals to enable constituents to access critical services within 20 minutes, enroll in support programs within 24 hours, obtain services within a week, and quickly receive equitable, high-quality service experiences, including wraparound support.

Creating seamless, digital processes that enable rapid enrollment in these programs will help deliver on these promises. Integrating a human-centric design methodology keeps people involved in the solution.

For example, shifting to mobile-first, streamlined application processes can create further transparency for constituents. They’ll no longer need to guess the status of their application or whether they completed it correctly.

We can help

Docusign works closely with government agencies to modernize their agreement processes, including transforming from paper to digital interactions that streamline the constituent experience.

To learn how your agency can meet constituents where they are and deliver services faster, visit Docusign for Federal Government. And to read the full version of this article, visit the Federal News Network.