Government agencies often struggle to provide high-quality digital services that meet citizen and employee expectations. Feature flags help overcome these obstacles by allowing teams fine-grain control over features throughout the feature lifecycle. This improves service reliability and enhances the citizen’s experience by enabling continuous improvements without risk of downtime, contextualized messages that improve personalization, and real-time control to reduce risk.
The Biden Administration’s recent executive order on Citizen Experience (CX) makes the development of optimal CX both good practice and a requirement for government agencies. When it comes to a user’s digital experience, government agencies face challenges similar to any leading ecommerce vendors or SaaS providers. Out of the gate, newly deployed services and features are immediately consumed by millions of users. And any errors or flaws in those deployments are magnified at scale. However, unlike a popular online retailer’s digital experience, a bad government experience is more than just an inconvenience to the end user—it may result in citizens being unable to access healthcare or order medication.
By using feature flags, agencies can deploy updates and new features more flexibly and efficiently. Feature flags also enable agencies to experiment with code, ensuring that the code they roll out delivers the best and most productive impacts to the user. Experimentation can be performed by A/B testing and tying that to metrics like a submit button click or page load time. Then, after the experiment, users just set the winning value to all recipients using feature flag controls without needing to go back and modify code.
There are many other advantages to using a feature flag management platform to improve the citizen’s digital experience. In this blog post, we’ll look at how two agencies are using LaunchDarkly to dramatically improve their CX efforts.
Federal customer experience trailblazers
Recreation.gov is the U.S. government's centralized park and recreation reservation system that supports 4.2 million online transactions annually. It is an essential service for millions of travelers wanting to explore America’s parks and recreational areas.
With the help of Booz Allen Hamilton’s development team, Recreation.gov used feature flags to safely improve the agency’s website’s CX and deliver an up-to-date user experience. Features such as the website’s support chatbot were tested in production with a subset of site visitors. They were then validated and eventually rolled out to all Recreation.gov users when ready. These robust feature management capabilities enable the agency to implement real-time changes and seamlessly deliver an updated user experience while ensuring a quality customer experience, even during periods of high traffic volumes. The results speak for themselves. As a result of these updates, Recreation.gov experienced:
- 30% increase in conversion rates
- 17.6% increase in loading time
- 5,000 hours of staff time saved per year
Similarly, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) used feature flags to test and deploy code during its open enrollment period (OEP) for programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The timeframe leading up to and during the OEP is the most highly trafficked period of the year for the agency—24 million enrolled via the website in 2020 alone—with people signing up for, reviewing, and updating their coverage and drug and health plan options. With feature flags, CMS can deploy and test code leading up to OEP without impacting end-users. Program managers can quickly update UI features for time-specific/sensitive site content, without writing and re-deploying code. The result for CMS is better software with less risk, as well as a significantly improved Net Promoter Score (NPS). Additionally, CMS saved 75 hours of development time over the course of five months as a direct result of this transformation.
Feature flags do the heavy lifting for CX
Optimal government CX is not a destination, but rather a journey of continuous improvement. However, the journey must be accompanied by the proper mechanisms for ensuring safe innovation. Feature flags play a pivotal role in empowering agencies to dramatically improve their CX at scale. By allowing agencies to cycle through experiments and improvements easily, with minimal risk and disruptions to the end user, feature flags ensure that agencies deliver the experiences that citizens expect. By enabling development teams to quickly deploy, test, and disable code, this solution help aids teams in meeting the requirements of their online public services and government experiences—all while putting the citizen at the forefront.
- To find out how feature flags can help your agency or program’s CX efforts, contact us today to learn more.
- Discover more case studies and success stories in groundbreaking CX efforts by viewing the Government Customer Experience and Engagement Summit.
- Learn more about LaunchDarkly supports U.S. government agencies.
.webp)
