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3 Lessons from the Clearmark Plain Language Awards
The 2012 Clearmark Plain Language Awards have been announced. As a 3-time judge for the government web and media entries, I have to tell you - this is a stellar group. The quality of entries in this awards program has improved by...
Customer Service Act Is Good News for Citizens and Employees
Good news! The Federal Customer Service Enhancement Act, H.R. 538 has passed out of a House committee and is moving forward. What? You’ve never heard of the Federal Customer Service Enhancement Act? Oh, my. ...
Communities of Like-Minded People Can Cause Real Change in Government
GovLoop is sponsoring a symposium on Customer Service, August 23. It promises to be a great event – bringing together customer service experts and passionistas from within and outside of government, and it hopes to culminate in some real...
No One’s Gonna Make You Do the Right Thing
I enjoyed Steve Radick's blog post on Govloop about implementing the Plain Writing Act. Steve speculates that it will take years (actually, he says “decades) to implement the Act. He gives several reasons, and they’re all...
Are We Ready to Provide Great Customer Service in Government?
On April 27, 2011, President Obama issued an Executive Order: Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service. In a nutshell, it directs agencies to develop and monitor customer service plans and measures and to solicit customer...
Reorganizing Government? Start Online!
Hope you didn’t miss this. In his State of the Union speech, President Obama talked about reorganizing government to consolidate programs/services. “There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies...
Successful Web Leaders Communicate Successfully
I haven’t talked about leadership for awhile. So let me beat that drum a bit. Web managers/editors/innovators (I’m still searching for the right moniker) have always been – and must always be – leaders to be successful. We have no delegated...
Train Your Web Team...Regularly
I just returned from a great two-day training session with the Defense Finance and Accounting Service web team, in Indianapolis. Kudos to Debra Harris for organizing it. She’s a real emerging leader in the web community. I was doing the training,...
Metrics That Matter
In my Web Manager University course, “Delivering Great Customer Service – Essentials for Government Web Managers,” I do a section on “metrics that matter.” I often start by asking folks if they collect performance data. Heads nod. ...
As We Do What’s Exciting, Let’s Not Forget What’s Important
Improving government's customer service means constantly looking for new ways to do things, seizing new technologies, and experimenting. All good. But as we do what’s exciting and new, let’s not forget that we also need to do what’s important. Like...
Clearing the Clutter - A Success Story
For years, many of us have worried there is too much content on government websites…that we’ve let the clutter overwhelm the content that our customers really want and use. Well, let me tell you what Sam Gallagher, my friend and...
Customers Know Best - It’s Their Results That Count
Have you discovered Anne Holland’s wonderful website, “Which Test Won?” I discovered it through a recent Gerry McGovern article, “It’s Not What People Say – It’s What They Do;” and – of course – I had to play. Each week, Anne posts two side-by-side...
