Harnessing User Journey Analytics for Vital Records Management

Like many government agencies, public health and vital records offices are continuously seeking ways to improve customer experience (CX), streamline processes, and deliver services more efficiently. While this mission is complex, collecting and analyzing detailed journey analytics can help agencies identify user pain points, reveal user patterns, and design treatments or “nudges” to influence user behavior and achieve better outcomes.

A Better Approach

User journey analytics is the science of analyzing user behavior across touchpoints and over time to measure the impact of user behavior on business outcomes. In essence, user journey analytics is the process of gathering and organizing as much data as possible about your customers or end users to define the common journeys users follow when interacting with your agency. Once you identify these common pathways, you can make changes that enhance customer experience and benefit the agency.

Let’s look at a couple examples.

User Case #1: Birth Registration

Improving the timeliness of birth registrations is a common goal for vital records agencies nationwide. While electronic records systems can easily show the average time for reporting, user journey analytics can help reveal deeper insights. For example, agencies could uncover insights related to

Resource allocation – Are there specific facilities or geographic areas where birth registration is taking significantly longer than other areas due to staffing shortages or changes in birth volume?
Training – Is registration timeliness related to the experience level of staff, and if so, how should training be modified?
Process optimization – Are there specific steps in the registration process that are repeatedly causing a bottleneck? How can customer behavior be influenced to fix this?

User Case #2: Amendments to Vital Records

Amending a birth certificate or death certificate to correct a typographical error, change the cause of death, or add/remove parent names is an arduous process. Each type of change often requires accessing a specific form on a website, filling it out correctly, having it notarized, and then visiting a physical office with the right additional documents. Vital records offices dedicate customer service resources to helping residents’ complete amendments, including offering support via toll free numbers, email, and online chat. By investing in the right technology and applying user journey analytics, agencies could harness this unstructured data to-

Identify the most common pain points for residents and develop resources or communication methods to address them. For example, if the data shows that most users complete the first few steps of the amendment process without issue but then fail to bring the documents into an office, the agency could use that data to justify investing in adding online notary services.

Understand trends in residents’ online behaviors and create treatments to guide them down the optimal path. For example, automatically sending an email with detailed instructions to a resident after they download a form may help decrease inbound calls.
Measure the efficacy of new communication channels. For example, agencies could examine whether introducing a new contact option like a chat bot or text messaging results in speedier case resolution.

Ultimately, vital records agencies can leverage user journey analytics to both improve customer experience and increase revenue. To learn more about how Voyatek can help, contact us.

-Voyatek Leadership Team