Design for Legitimacy and Scale

Government of Abu Dhabi – Effortless Customer Experience Maturity Assessment & Awards Program

Context & Challenge
The Government of Abu Dhabi sought to shift customer experience from isolated service improvements to a coherent, system-wide capability across a highly federated public sector. The challenge was not the absence of good services, but uneven maturity, fragmented governance, and limited mechanisms for cross-government learning and accountability.

What We Did
Under contract to the International Foundation for Customer Experience in Government, Synthetikos served as Lead Assessor for the Effortless Customer Experience initiative, leading a standardized CX maturity assessment applied across more than 40 government departments, agencies, and corporations. The work synthesized qualitative and quantitative evidence across service design, governance, data, and delivery, translating complex organizational realities into benchmarked, decision-ready insights for senior leadership.

What Was Different
Rather than treating CX as a compliance exercise, the assessment was positioned as a capability accelerator, using evidence, peer comparison, and feedback loops to drive improvement. The awards program reinforced this by turning recognition into a learning mechanism, not just a performance signal.

Impact & Learning
The initiative has established a shared CX maturity model and baseline across government, enabled more targeted leadership conversations about capability gaps, and supported cross-entity learning at scale. Over four years of annual assessments, the Government of Abu Dhabi has dramatically and quantifiably elevated CX maturity at a whole of government scale. The core insight: system-wide service improvement advances fastest when assessment, learning, and recognition are deliberately designed as one integrated mechanism.