Defining and celebrating exceptional federal data practices
Retirement. Disability. Medicare. Insurance claims. Passport applications. Taxes. Student loans. These are all stressful, emotionally charged issues that millions of Americans deal with every day – but they shouldn’t have to deal with difficult-to-access services and poor customer experience too.
When a member of the public needs an update on any of these government services, they often call an agency contact center. Indeed, federal contact centers are frequently the most critical touchpoint between the public and federal government – one that shapes the customer experience, public perception and trust. A great experience with a contact center can result in an individual feeling their government worked for them; a poor experience can damage the individual’s trust in government. In this age of social media, word spreads fast from a dissatisfied customer and can compound beliefs that government services are outdated and inaccessible.
Recognizing this, the Partnership for Public Service, in collaboration with Deloitte, set out to understand the customer experience challenges and opportunities facing federal contact centers today given public expectation that customer experience in the federal government is as seamless and quick as it is in the private sector, particularly given emerging technologies, such as agentic AI, are becoming more widespread. What does modernization look like in the federal landscape of 2025 and beyond? What promising practices and strategies are emerging? These questions are especially timely as federal agencies undergo large-scale reorganizations, face budget pressures and experience significant workforce reductions just as new technologies rapidly evolve. Modernizing contact centers through responsible, human-centered design best practices and use of emerging technologies aligns with broader federal priorities outlined in the latest Executive Order on AI, Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. These modernization efforts show how applying technology thoughtfully at the frontlines of service delivery can improve outcomes for the public, reduce operational burdens and reinforce public trust.
Through a series of structured interviews with former and current federal leaders in the customer experience and contact center space, we identified challenges and opportunities shaping modernization efforts today, along with recommendations for continuing to scale these efforts across government.
There are many call centers across government housed at various agencies. According to digital.gov, these centers are meant to serve as a central point for the public to access services or request assistance. To understand the importance of contact centers in federal service delivery, take one example – large federal agencies like the IRS receive about 100 million calls per year through their toll-free lines – live agents answer less than a third of them in peak seasons. While improving customer experience has been a strategic priority across the last several administrations, without modernization, contact centers face continued negative outcomes. Furthermore, the government is estimated to spend over $20 billion a year on contact centers, primarily on outdated technology and processes.
Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in addressing outdated contact center technologies and practices. Customer experience and modernization was featured in the President’s Management Agenda and Cross-Agency Priority goals during the first Trump administration and during the Biden administration. Under the Trump administration, CX efforts emphasized modernization, cloud adoption and the launch of the GSA Centers of Excellence. The Biden administration expanded this work through EO 14058 on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government, which designates High Impact Service Providers and calls for a more seamless and human-centered delivery of government services.
In 2020, the General Services Administration’s Contact Center of Excellence published the Contact Center Playbook, outlining a comprehensive modernization framework that included governance, customer feedback integration, automation, staff training, designing a future state vision, leveraging innovative technologies such as AI and RPA (robotic process automation) and promoting a culture of continuous improvement. Similarly, GSA’s 2020 white paper, Emerging Technologies in Contact Centers, emphasized the need for contact center transformation by integrating emerging technologies to enhance customer experience while lowering costs. Despite this focus from the center of government, adoption of these practices has been ad hoc, highlighting the need for more consistent focus.
The technological changes in private sector contact centers have created a public expectation for quick, easy-to-access services and put pressure on the federal government to offer the same. The rise of agentic AI, cloud-native tools and accelerated deployment timelines as well as changing customer expectations informed by superior private sector best practices and experiences have collectively reshaped what “good” looks like in government service delivery. The current efforts to arbitrarily reduce the workforce and cut programming across agencies threaten progress toward modernization efforts. Yet, the current moment also presents an unprecedented opportunity – even necessity – to reimagine government service delivery, which could fundamentally reshape the future of contact centers, leading to a new era of operational efficiency, customer experience and service delivery for the public.
Between the fall of 2024 and spring 2025, the Partnership and Deloitte interviewed a diverse group of federal and state customer experience and contact center leaders with direct experience managing contact centers and customer experience initiatives. These interviews encompassed a cross-section of contact center operations from strategic policy planning to day-to-day service delivery. Those interviewed included senior executives with experience overseeing large-scale operations, technology and innovation leads and those with oversight of public-facing high-touch programs. These interviews revealed several key insights that can inform modernization work going forward.
Outdated Technology. Like much of the federal government, many contact centers still rely on outdated data and technology systems (i.e., often costly large government-owned data centers) that make it difficult to implement modern solutions or integrate data and services across platforms. Many centers lack cloud infrastructure, modern customer relationship management tools and centralized data systems, limiting their ability to respond efficiently to customer needs.
Inconsistent Budgets. Budgetary constraints and funding unpredictability continue to be major challenges. Interviewees noted that beyond limited budgets, the lack ofstable, year-over-year funding due to delayed appropriations and continuing resolutions creates uncertainty that hinders long-term planning. Limited funding makes it difficult for agencies to invest in recent technologies and training programs. While pilot programs show promise, scaling them often requires extensive budget justification. Additionally, competition for internal funding means proposed initiatives must clearly demonstrate operational value. Leaders noted that tying customer experience and employee experience improvements together strengthens the business case, as it reflects efficiency gains, improved public service outcomes and bottom-line mission outcomes that are measurable.
Lengthy Procurement Processes. While many modern, cloud-based solutions can be deployed in as little as 48 hours, federal procurement cycles can stretch over 12 months. This disconnect creates a critical challenge: by the time a solution is approved and acquired, it may already lag the latest technological capabilities or no longer meet evolving user expectations. The speed of innovation outpaces traditional acquisition processes, presenting a significant hurdle in service delivery.
Siloed Data. Fragmented systems across departments make it difficult to collect cohesive data and share that data for real-time decision-making. Many agencies use multiple platforms which can inhibit collaboration, limit interoperability and increase costs through redundant contracts. Additionally, contact center insights are not always fed back into product or service development pipelines, resulting in decreased process improvement based on customer feedback.
Cultural Resistance. The pervasive resistance to change remains a cultural and operational barrier. As previously noted, many federal contact centers rely on outdated, fragmented systems – but even when new technologies like AI are made available, integrating them can be difficult, particularly when no one has clearly communicated to staff if or how they will remain essential in a technology-enhanced, AI-augmented workplace. In some cases, the challenge is not rapid change, but unsupported change without sufficient training and explanation. At the same time, the reductions of staffing across government means workloads are rising, making it harder for agencies to create the space needed for effective change management. Without a clear narrative, skepticism and fear can stall progress.
Developing User-Centered Tools. Agencies have large volumes of customer interaction data, but it is often underused as a resource to identify and build tools for the full diversity of customers, from tech-averse seniors to mobile-first younger users. With the growth of “customer science”– using behavioral data to understand the optimal experience for each individual – agencies can better understand ideal customer pathways and prioritize top contact drivers for self-service.
Implementing AI Tools Across Contact Centers. Contact Center leaders are exploring generative and agentic AI use cases that allow employees to focus on more complex issues rather than routine tasks; contact center leadership is increasingly exploring the use of AI to reallocate time and reduce labor-intensive tasks for agents. The goal is to offload high-volume, repetitive interactions so that human agents can focus on issues that require complexity, nuance and empathy. The most promising technologies are those that either resolve customer needs directly – reducing the need for agent involvement – or assist agents in delivering faster, more accurate service when human support is required. This includes tools such as agent assist technologies that help staff respond more quickly; AI tools that transcribe full calls, track sentiment and give real-time insights; and IVRs (interactive voice response) that automate identity verification. These tools extract and condense complex program information in real time, serving as on-demand knowledge bases that enhance both agent performance and customer experience. The emphasis is on smart, targeted adoption that boosts efficiency and service quality.
Increasing Customer Experience Through Better Employee Experience. Partnership research confirms that the employee experience and customer experience are strongly correlated. Agencies with stronger employee engagement, a measure of the broader concept of employee experience, tend to provide better customer experience. At the same time, improving the customer experience can boost how federal employees experience their work. Empowering frontline staff with better tools, relevant training and meaningful input into technology decisions results in better service for the public. Interviewees stated they are already seeing this with recent advancements in agent assist, which are making agents’ jobs significantly easier and less stressful. As these technologies scale and agents are better supported, there will be potential for agents to perform more confidently and efficiently, which in turn can lead to a better experience for the customer.
Expand Self-Service with Intention
Self-service should be designed with purpose, not as an afterthought. Contact Centers should work with agency customer experience teams to analyze real call data to identify the top 100 contact drivers and then design tools to allow customers to resolve issues without requiring human intervention. Effective self-service means getting people to a resolution on the first interaction. To be successful, self-service solutions must reflect real user behavior and needs, not internal agency assumptions.
Invest in Internal Agentic AI Tools
Agentic AI is not just for customer-facing applications; it is a powerful internal tool that transforms how agents work, especially in real time. Modern agent assist tools support staff during live calls by surfacing relevant knowledge articles, recommending next-best actions, summarizing case history and call sentiment and offering rapid responses. By reducing cognitive load, contact centers staff can work smarter, respond faster and deliver more consistent service while focusing on the human side of service – empathy, listening and trust-building.
Shift to Cloud-Native, Configurable Tools
To accelerate deployment and reduce risk, contact centers should shift to cloud-native solutions – or technology solutions specifically created to run on cloud computing platforms – that are flexible and configurable. Unlike traditional legacy systems, these tools can often be launched in days and adapted over time to meet evolving needs. Prioritizing cloud-native platforms not only enables smoother integration across departments and ensures that modernization efforts are future-ready, but it can also reduce the data center footprint and is a lower cost of ownership. However, this shift requires intentional change management to ensure buy-in and minimize disruptions to staff and service delivery.
Effective Rollout of AI Tools
AI systems require thoughtful onboarding, context and continuous feedback loops to be effective just like humans do. Interviewees emphasized the importance of strong knowledge bases, user-centered design and seamless collaboration between customer experience, IT and contact center teams. This collaboration is especially critical when rolling out new tools or processes. Clearly communicating how potential tools can help agents perform their work, incorporating input from frontline staff during development and testing ensures the tools are useful, boosts adoption and reduces friction. When employees feel supported and part of the process, it can lead to more consistent, empathetic and effective service delivery. In short, investing in the employee experience is foundational to achieving better outcomes for the public.
Implement Robust Governance Structures
Agencies must establish clear leadership and accountability structures for both contact center operations and modernization efforts. This includes designating responsible teams or individuals to oversee strategy, coordinating across departments and ensuring alignment with broader CX, IT and digital transformation goals. Without strong governance, even the best tools and strategies can falter in execution. Effective governance also ensures that customer insights and operational data inform agency-wide decision-making, not just contact center metrics.
Invest in Workforce Upskilling
Providing continuous training and support is essential to prepare employees for modern contact center environments. As roles evolve and AI becomes further integrated into daily workflows, staff must be equipped with new skills in order to use the tools and understand how to evaluate and act on the content generated by these technologies, how to handle complex exceptions and how to manage high-value, emotionally sensitive interactions. Importantly, upskilling does not need to be resource intensive. Agencies can begin with small-scale efforts such as deploying microlearning modules or hosting internal town halls to build AI literacy and reduce uncertainty among staff. Interviewees also emphasized that frontline agents – especially those working through contractors – often require different engagement strategies, targeted change management and clear, consistent feedback mechanisms to deliver the high-touch service the public expects.
Rethinking Metrics Beyond a Checklist
Call center leaders and staff need to look at metrics such as average handle time and ticket closures beyond a “checklist” lens – these metrics simply open the door for understanding a problem, not the final point. Collecting significant amounts of data without better customer sentiment analysis and storytelling to drive decision-making is not efficient or effective in resource-constrained environments. Instead, agencies should ask, “Did we solve your problem?” and adopt trend-based coaching approaches to drive better agent performance. AI analytics tools, which can monitor every call and aggregate the data to true analysis of sentiment, can reveal the root causes and thereby help agencies come up with better solutions.
Build a Tiered Contact Center Model
A modern contact center must operate with a tiered model: Tier 1 and Tier 2 interactions can increasingly be managed by virtual agents or self-service tools. Tier 3 interactions (i.e., those that are complex, sensitive, or emotionally charged) should be escalated to human agents. By the end of this decade, most routine inquiries, including those that require empathy, nuance and discretion, will be resolved through advanced AI, while human agents will increasingly focus on exceptional cases where human judgment remains essential. The success of this model depends on well-designed, transparent escalation paths. Emerging large language models power agentic AI that enables virtual agents to go beyond basic guidance – these tools can also serve as proactive digital assistants, guiding users through next steps, explaining decisions, providing information and even completing transactions.
Enhance Knowledge Management
Centralizing and maintaining up-to-date knowledge repositories is essential to ensure consistent and accurate responses across all contact channels. AI can then be applied to automate knowledge delivery – both to customers and agents – so that the right information surfaces at the right time. Good knowledge management not only improves service quality but also reduces training time and increases agent confidence.
Establish an Effective Change Management Program
As noted above, an effective change management program both within the agency and with the public is key to successfully integrating emerging technologies and tools. This means engaging employees, especially those on the front lines, early in the process to shape the design and rollout of new tools. Leadership must visibly demonstrate support of the change. Clear, consistent communication that explains the purpose and benefits of the transformation can help reduce resistance and build trust.
As previously highlighted, call center leadership must also prioritize employee training and create the necessary feedback loops to continuously improve operations, service quality and the integration of emerging technologies based on employee and customer feedback. These efforts must be ongoing to help call center employees shift behaviors, successfully adopt emerging technologies and tools, and deliver better service.
Engage the Public
Finally, there is a need to educate the public as new technologies are introduced. Self-service tools, virtual agents and AI-based systems only succeed if customers understand how to use them and trust that they will work. Clear communication, thoughtful directions and marketing, and user-centered design are essential to ensure adoption and build confidence. An effective change management program both within the agency and with the public is one of the critical success factors.
Contact center solutions of today and in the future are moving to eliminate significant challenges. To illustrate the future of federal service delivery at a contact center, imagine an individual named Alex calls the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Resource Center and begins interacting with a human-like agentic agent voice solution:
Alex: Yes, I’m looking to get an FHA loan for a house and want to know what type is right for me.
Bot: Got it, Alex! I’d be happy to help you with that. Let’s explore the different FHA loan types together.
Alex: Well, I plan on buying a house and then fixing it up.
Bot: Sounds like an exciting project! For that, you might want to consider an FHA 203K loan.
Alex: I see, and what are the requirements for that loan?
Bot: You’ll need a credit score of at least 580 and you have to put down at least 3.5%
Alex: Got it, ok and thank you for your help.
Bot: You’re welcome and thank you for contacting the FHA Resource Center.
As a customer calls the contact center, agentic bot solutions seamlessly integrate with customer relationship management platforms. These integrations automatically provide contact center agents with key information already provided such as lender ID or even authentication status. Agentic AI can also understand the intent of the call and then provide the agent with a suggested solution. Let’s continue the scenario with Michelle after she’s been transferred to Agent Andy.
Agent Andy: Thank you for calling HUD’s FHA Resource Center. Am I speaking with Michelle?
Michelle: Yes
Agent Andy: Great! I see you are calling about canceling a loan application, is that right?
Michelle: Yes, I was hoping you could help me with that.
Agent Andy: Of course. Give me just a second to look that up for you… To confirm, you would like to cancel case number 12345.
Michelle: That’s right.
Generative –AI agentic assistants continue listening to the call while simultaneously providing the agent with suggested solutions in real time. Agents can also ask the AI assistant questions and quickly receive answers, eliminating the need for agents to do manual searches for content. Now, the agents gain immediate access to knowledge articles and standard operating procedure manuals as illustrated in Michelle’s scenario.
Michelle: If you can text me, that would be great.
Agent Andy: Of course! Is 555-555-1212 the best number for that?
Michelle: Yes, it is.
Agent Andy: Perfect, I just sent it to you.
Michelle: Great, I just got it.
Agent Andy: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Michelle: No thank you, that was it. Thank you so much for your help.
Agent Andy: My pleasure. Have a great day and thank you for calling HUD’s FHA Resource Center.
As the call ends, the call center agents have the tools to properly wrap up the record for ultimate traceability. Generative AI solutions can automatically summarize conversations and provide end-to-end summaries that all stakeholders can review.
This is the reality federal contact centers must be ready to deliver.
The stakes in federal service delivery to the public are high. To meet the moment, federal leaders must act swiftly and strategically. Implementing change is not enough; contact centers must also be equipped with the tools, talent and networks to learn, adapt and scale new ways of working. Moreover, it is critical these tools be integrated in alignment with agency and customer-expectations around privacy and confidentiality of personal information, including voice, cyber-security, transparency and accessibility. Regardless of how contact centers integrate emerging technologies such as AI, they need to be mindful of each of these issues and put governance processes in place to ensure security and efficiency. Without this, recent investments in modernization will fall short of their full potential.
Given today’s technological disruptions and evolving public expectations, modernizing government contact centers is not optional – it is essential to strengthening service delivery and restoring public trust. Leaders should consider adopting existing and emerging tools, tailor solutions with purpose and prepare their workforce for the next generation of government service.
