View on the Public Sector from the Perspective of Citizens

People nowadays are used to being served directly online and having instant interactions with companies. Questions or request are resolved almost immediately. In the customer journeys they are accustomed to, it is normal the same information is not requested twice, and personal advice is given. Since this is the current status quo, citizens expect this from the public sector as well. Last week we discussed our view on the public sector from the perspective of policy making and automation. In this blog, we highlight the public sector from a citizen’s perspective including citizens access to public services, tailored citizens advice and solutions for the e-government.

Challenges in citizens access to public services

Citizens consider the government as one organization, not knowing there may be many domains involved in the process that applies to them. The main challenge lies in these different domains and the silos they use: management systems unable to operate with other systems. Even though these silos offer structure in an organization, they stand in the way of truly citizen-centric services. They make it difficult to offer an optimized citizens access to public services. After all, working in silos means the system is cut off from interacting with other systems making it impossible to cooperate with other domains and other systems. Citizens however don’t see the added value to give the same information repeatedly to what in their eyes is one and the same organization. They expect to be recognized as an individual and not as a social security number. This personalized citizens access to public services unfortunately is impossible to offer when systems work against each other. So how can we resolve these challenges? 

The road to tailored citizens advice

As stated before, today’s citizens expect to be treated as an individual. The road to this tailored advice lies in personalized customer journeys containing: 

  • Customized products, concerning permitting, taxes and benefits. 
  • A relevant completion process across all touchpoints and channels, from web to chat.  
  • The ability to switch between online self-service, guidance and advice of intelligent services and expertise of government employees.  

To allow a personalized customer journey, the government must guide citizens across all the involved silos, without experiencing their existence. Citizens may approach the same process from a dozen different directions, but the flow of the process should be the same for all. Even when there are rules and regulations in place that are not transparent between the domains. The role of the government is to help citizens comply to all rules while focusing on policy making. The solution? A layer, such as an intelligent automation platform, on top of these silos that offers service, without creating an extra knowledge intensive dimension. 

Read more about policy making & automation 

Solutions for the e-government 

The public sector has a digital account management function to help citizens over silos. The main goal is to grant them effortless access to public services, while they can rely on tailored advice. These goals can be addressed in several ways and therefore may be translated to a variety of solutions. We would like to introduce four of those to you. An intelligent automation platform makes the following solutions for e-government possible: 

  1. Virtual Advisors support citizens in finding the best solution for their personal situation by giving tailored advice. Virtual advisors combine marketing rules with eligibility, applicability and fiscal rules. 
  2. Virtual Assistants collaborate with citizens by providing personalized feedback, communication and advice on improvements and opportunities. 
  3. Intelligent forms ask citizens exclusively what is necessary to complete requests, offering a smart, stripped-down completion processes. Reuse existing data, integrate other systems and use context to minimize citizen effort and minimize drop-off ratios. 
  4. Responsive 360° citizen portals, with all the benefits of automated and intelligent dynamic processes are a good fit for the more permanent, citizen-centric environments. In this way, you create a relevant and context sensitive citizen self-service enabling them to solve problems, update information, manage details, subscriptions and payments without requiring any interaction with a human government employee. Do this across different channels, from websites to chat and call centers.   

Optimized citizens access in practice 

The Multi Permits Solution (MPS) is a best practice, developed by our partner BearingPoint Caribbean. The Be Informed intelligent automation platform was used to cover all front- and back office workflows on permitting. Citizens access is optimized to use faster permit services while reducing cost of operation. The result is: 

  • Improved citizens services 
  • Substantial operational savings 
  • Higher employee productivity 

What is up next?

Today we discussed our view on the public sector from the perspective of citizens, focusing on citizens access to public services, personalized citizens advice and solutions for e-government. Next week we will dive deeper into this subject from a the perspective of an integral service concept. Stay tuned by signing up below or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to stay in the loop at all times.

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