Government experience trends: Three big challenges shaping the sector in 2025

Experience management can be a challenging task in any industry, and government is no exception. Managing experiences is a nuanced endeavor, requiring agencies to effectively address evolving public expectations while ensuring they provide dependable services to the public.

Trust, resilience, and productivity. These are the core challenges government agencies must meet head on in 2025 if they’re looking to build experiences that serve the public.

But doing so may not be easy.

In the US specifically, government organizations are undergoing significant changes,  while public perception of their ability to deliver reliable services is strained.

Globally, there’s a noticeable difference between the kind of customer experience on offer from private sector businesses and what governments can offer. In fact, our 2025 research puts this difference in customer satisfaction at 17 percentage points:

• 59%: Customer satisfaction in government
• 76%: Customer satisfaction in other industries

This gap is only being exacerbated by slow digital transformation, limited access to  customer and employee data, and ever-tightening budgets that leave teams stretching to do more with less.

It’s a perfect storm, but one that can be weathered with the right approach to gathering feedback, analyzing data, and strengthening system-level processes.

Our free guide, the 2025 Government Experience Trends Report, outlines how these challenges can be overcome by focusing on three key trends. Read on for a snapshot of what’s happening – and then download the eBook for a thorough breakdown on how government agencies can move forward with data-driven insights.

 1. Trust is tenuous – especially for government

Trust is an  important quality to earn, nurture, and grow in government.

Trust leads to participation, which enables outcomes shaped more by public interest than cost. Unfortunately, customer trust in government is perennially low. On an international level, it’s 11 percentage points lower than trust in any other industry.

And it’s the same story for employees; internal trust in governmental leaders is some 14 points lower than in other sectors.

But here’s the thing: trust as a metric usually correlates tightly with how often people are able to give feedback – importantly, feedback that they feel is heard and acted upon.

So the key question for government here is: What systems do you have in place to listen to your employees and customers?

Listening, whether via solicited feedback or omnichannel analytics, is the key to making decisions driven by need. Acting on insights gathered is how you close the loop and tighten the gap between expectation and experience. It’s something government bodies around the globe need to focus on as they seek to boost trust at both the customer and employee level.

2. Resilience is the antidote to chaos

When change rocks the boat, it pays to keep a steady hand. Turbulent times within government settings require concerted efforts to keep services ticking along with some degree of stability and reliability.

A big part of this is keeping employees happy, motivated, and empowered to do their best work amidst uncertainty. Our research shows that employee wellbeing is the most important metric to track when it comes to maintaining engagement through disruption, but government employees are 14 percentage points less likely to feel a sense of professional wellbeing than those in other industries.

Change management is also a sticking point. Competencies here are rated 14 points lower than other industries too, which speaks to departments where incoming leaders are disrupting by design.

The answer? Risk management tools that can handle ever-changing environments, technologies, and data without cascading into chaos.

That’s especially true in a world where some 64% of people expect more personalized interactions, despite overwhelming distrust of the mechanisms used to capture and store the kind of data that enable them.

3. Productivity is our common goal

Almost a third of government employees report that they feel pressure to increase productivity. But they’re not alone; the hunt for efficiency gains is a universal, cross-industry truth.

But this is an issue grounded in outdated systems; government bodies  tend to be slower to adopt technology-enabled process transformation.

AI and machine learning, for example, can fundamentally change how service delivery is handled and staffed. AI-enabled experience management and contact center software can automate some of the repetitive tasks, allowing human agents to focus on more critical work.

Currently, the potential of AI in government  is under-realized. More than half of government employees globally say they never use AI tools at work, and those who do often rely on personal tools they discover themselves.

This situation is not ideal, as it not only raises security risks, but  also undermines efforts to boost human efficiency. Significant advancements in digital transformation are necessary for government productivity to catch up to their private sector contemporaries.

Take these trends further

Trust. Resilience. Productivity. These are the interconnected characteristics that tomorrow’s government agencies and services need to embody and build upon if they want to make strides in experience management – both on paper and in public perception.

Doing so effectively relies on three things:

1. Understanding what’s causing each trend
2. Learning which metrics and measures can help drive change
3. Schooling up on the tech that can make all the difference

Our free eBook, the 2025 Government Experience Trends Report, is your guide to all three of these competencies.

In it, we explore the circumstances that mesh together to form the current status quo in government service delivery, dive into each trend in depth, and then turn our attention to what comes next. And how.

The report draws from Qualtrics’ 2025 Global studies of Customer and Employee Experience – and more than 23,000 survey responses – to provide a holistic view of customer interactions with government organizations, alongside employees’ real world experiences working for government agencies.

Our guide is your playbook for better experience management in government – built on a basis of rich understanding on both the customer and employee sides of the fence.