Prioritising Customer Experience in Future Policy and Service Design
As the United States faces critical challenges, including emerging from the pandemic and advancing equity, the need for services that are simple to use, accessible, protective, and transparent is imperative. Technology is identified as a key enabler of equity in improving accessibility for populations historically underserved. By improving the ability to process benefits and access services for groups such as disaster survivors, single parents, immigrants, small business owners, and veterans, there is significant utility gained not only for the individual, but for the nation as a whole.
The renewed approach to enhancing customer experience and service delivery which will be fundamentally driven by the voice-of-the-citizen through human-centred design methodologies, including empirical customer research. By demonstrating that this process is effective and efficient, in addition to being fair, protective of privacy interests, and transparent, the Federal Government can develop greater trust with the citizen. Furthermore, this approach to providing services to the public identifies and collects feedback from customers, establishing service standards and measuring performance against those standards.
So, with the gauntlet laid down by the US, it will be interesting to note the policy direction of the Australian Government in this critical area over the coming years. After a slew of high-profile gaffes (the 2016 #censusfail and the myGov outage due to the surge of COVID-19 welfare claims), the future for CX innovation is looking brighter. Notably, the revamped myGov is in its final stage of beta testing and promises to offer a tailored user experience in-line with social media companies and streaming services like Netflix. However, there are still some glaring issues:
At the time of writing, it purportedly takes over an hour wait time to speak to Centrelink, with little option in the way of parity care channels;
The claims processing times across some government agencies are taking multiple months to resolve
Whether the Australian Government adopts a similar top-down policy approach remains to be seen. At an agency level though, there are some key measures which can be adopted in the here and now to improve customer experience:
Increased investment in AI and automation to speed up back-office processes and bring about faster resolution times for citizens
Combining broad open-source research with human-centred design to identify pain points not visible to the agency, validate their prevalence, and then implement empathetic service design frameworks that place the citizen at the heart of the process
Providing multiple channels of support beyond the traditional call centre to meet citizens on the channel of their choosing; be it social media, live chat, email or modern messaging applications like WhatsApp
Ensuring that available digital services and solutions are clearly outlined to citizens through an effective communications plan, inclusive of the agency and executives. A great example of using Executive Digital Leadership (EDL) is Victor Dominello, who recently utilised his LinkedIn presence to communicate delays in NSW’s RAT registration while articulating the additional benefits of NSW’s portal in comparison to the other states and territories
By placing customer experience at the heart of policy and service design, government agencies can increase citizen-centricity and trust with populations.
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Article as seen on LinkedIn .