Presented by Zoom & Carahsoft
Many people still interact with government through disconnected channels: a phone call, a web form, a letter in the mail or an in-person visit. Chris O’Rourke, Customer Experience Executive and Account Executive at Zoom, says the future should look different. Government should design service delivery around the full journey from first contact to completion.
In this Innovation in Government segment from the GovExperience Summit, O’Rourke begins by describing the current state. High-impact service providers interact with the public frequently, but many of those interactions are still channel-based rather than journey-based. A person may call one office, fill out a form somewhere else and wait for an update without a clear understanding of what happens next.
O’Rourke says the future must be trust first. Government interactions involve sensitive information and critical services, so agencies need secure architectures, including zero trust principles, before layering on AI, chat or other digital tools. Innovation cannot come at the expense of confidence.
Accessibility is also central to his vision. O’Rourke discusses 508 compliance, closed captioning, sign language translation and language access for people who speak languages other than English. For him, accessibility is not just a compliance requirement. It is part of meeting constituents where they are and making services usable for people with different needs.
The goal is not to force everyone into one channel. It is to give people the right channel at the right moment and preserve continuity throughout the journey. O’Rourke calls this “conversation to completion.” That means the agency should not simply answer one question and end the interaction. If a case needs to be opened, the constituent should receive action items, ownership, expectations and a clear path for follow-up.
The segment also looks at how real-time analysis can improve service quality. Contact centers often rely on post-call surveys, but those surveys capture feedback after the interaction is over and only when people choose to respond. O’Rourke describes a future where agencies can analyze sentiment in real time, identify whether a conversation is going well, bring in supervisor support when needed and review transcripts to identify common misunderstandings.
That kind of capability could help agencies improve both individual interactions and broader service design. If many people are confused by the same form, policy or web page, the agency can identify the pattern and fix the source of the problem.
O’Rourke’s segment makes clear that the future of CX is not simply digital. It is secure, accessible, multimodal and accountable. AI and video can help, but only if they are part of a service model that protects information, supports people with different needs and follows the interaction through to resolution.
For government agencies, that is the standard citizens increasingly expect: not just contact, but completion.
Key Takeaways