Presented by Qualtrics & Carahsoft
Many agencies have spent years collecting more data, building dashboards and developing insight capabilities. Emilee Lehenbauer, VP, Federal at Qualtrics, says the next challenge is making sure that data reaches the right people in time to improve service delivery.
In this Innovation in Government segment from the GovExperience Summit, Lehenbauer discusses the role technology can play in cross-agency collaboration and integrated service ecosystems. She acknowledges that government agencies face real constraints around security, privacy and regulatory compliance. Those constraints are important and necessary. But agencies also face internal silos created by leadership structures, team boundaries, disconnected data systems and the policies that govern them.
Lehenbauer says agencies need a data layer that can cut across those silos. That means bringing together information from call centers, chats, email transcripts, surveys, agent notes and other channels into one place. When agencies aggregate that data, they can see what is happening across the service environment in real time.
The timing matters. In many organizations, insights are delivered through after-action reports that arrive weeks or months after the service issue occurred. By then, the opportunity to improve a specific interaction may be gone. Lehenbauer argues that the goal should be to empower agency leaders and front-line employees to act when the information is still actionable.
That is a shift from insight to action. Lehenbauer says many agencies are now data rich. They have identified the need for data, collected it, aggregated it and learned how to interpret much of what it says. The harder question is how to drive change from that information. Who gets the data? Do they have authority to act? Are governance structures clear? Do performance metrics reward collaboration? Does the culture allow employees to surface problems honestly?
Lehenbauer argues that agencies need a culture where negative data is not treated as failure, but as evidence of what needs to be fixed. If leaders punish bad metrics, employees may avoid surfacing the truth. If leaders use those metrics to guide improvement, agencies can identify friction points and solve them.
That mindset is essential for customer experience. Service delivery improves when agencies understand what people are experiencing, where processes are breaking down and what front-line teams need to respond. Omnichannel data can show the patterns, but culture determines whether the agency acts.
Lehenbauer’s segment captures a major turning point in government CX. The work is no longer just about collecting more feedback or producing more reports. It is about creating systems that move insight to the people closest to the work and giving them the authority, incentives and support to improve outcomes.
For agencies, being data rich is not enough. The next step is becoming action ready.
Key Takeaways