By Tom McNeal
Businesses know the high cost of an underwhelming customer experience. Organizations engaged in commerce have invested in applications and platforms that provide frictionless, secure customer experiences online or via phone enabling businesses to build and retain loyalty and to protect sales and growth prospects. In turn, consumers have been conditioned to expect a high level of service in a wide range of interactions, including those with government agencies.
Fortifying trust in government systems
Government agencies can take a page from the private sector playbook, and the timing is critical. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center reported that trust in the federal government was near historic lows, while other surveys reported greater faith in commercial brands than in government. One way to begin reversing the trend is for government agencies to improve the citizen experience by restoring confidence in a primary mode of interaction: the phone channel.
By Justin Katz
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, told a panel of senators on Tuesday that his company estimates the cybersecurity breach of nine federal agencies and 100 private companies likely took at least a thousand skilled and capable people to pull off. At Microsoft as we worked with customers that had been impacted by this, we stepped back and just analyzed all of the engineering steps that we had seen and we asked ourselves how many engineers do we believed had worked on this collective effort and the answer we came to was at least a thousand,” Smith told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I should say at least a thousand very skilled, capable engineers. So we haven’t seen this kind of sophistication matched with this kind of scale, he added.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) announced plans to reintroduce two bills covering inclusion and oversight of the federal workforce at a Feb. 23 House hearing.
National Security Diversity and Inclusion Workforce Act would require national security agencies to publicly report on their diversity and inclusion efforts and the Merit Systems Protection Board Empowerment Act would reauthorize the agency through 2026 and give it authority to survey federal employees.
Connolly, who chairs the Subcommittee on Government Operations of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform said the government is at a critical inflection point when it comes to federal workforce policy – and what he and other Democrats see as an assault on the civil service by former President Donald Trump and his administration.