How to meet liquid expectations in digital government

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In an increasingly digital world, high standard of service are becoming the norm and are being set by best-of-breed providers across all of our experiences – regardless of sector. People now have ‘liquid expectations’ and, for governments, this means the digital consumer is now the digital citizen. As agencies race to adopt digital to improve public service delivery, they face users that now demand the simplest, most enjoyable and rewarding experience they see elsewhere.

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For public services to be embraced by citizens (and for digital investments to be realised), agencies must ask themselves what their services would look like if the likes of Apple delivered them – and then build services to that ideal. To do this, public service leaders need to continuously ask three important questions:

Do we really know our users?
What did we break today?
Can users do what they want, when they want?

Read on to find out more about each of these questions for public service leaders.

Citizens want services organised around them, not around government departments. The movement from a one-size-fits-all to a personalised approach begins with knowing end users well enough to understand and respond to their needs – not just at a single point in time but continuously.

This may seem daunting, given a potential user bases in the millions. An effective step which some government departments have borrowed from private companies is the creation of “user personas.”

At New Zealand Inland Revenue, user personas were created based on information already held, as well as extensive research. Each has a distinct set of attributes that typify particular users.

Effective service design then involves crafting relevant provisions that meets the needs of all the personas rather than just a single, notional user.

Changes in both user demand and expectation levels also call for a new approach to designing, testing and optimising services. Extensive long-term planning needs to be replaced with prototyping, experiments and iterative improvements that allow problems to be spotted before resources are wasted.

In 2012, before building an extension, Finland’s University Hospital of Tampere worked with researchers from Aalto University to create a 200-square metre “prototyping space” with cardboard walls and props. In a three-day workshop, patients and medical staff gave their views on the experience of different mock-ups of the facility. Researchers’ observations of the interaction informed not only the design of the new wing, but helped streamline treatment pathways and processes, and save money.

Accenture research found that 57% of the Australian population want to speak with someone in conjunction with their online services. As this shows, there will always be a need for human contact, particularly in areas such as pensions, child support and social security. The challenge is to find creative ways to blend the digital and human elements of a service into a coherent, relevant and efficient experience.

Seamless user experiences also rely on service continuity between channels and how to blend the physical and digital experience. As users move through any given interaction with government they should always be able to start and stop on any device or in person without going to the back of the queue or having re-enter information.

One private sector example is Amazon Kindle’s Mayday feature. This lets a user connect with a human customer support worker directly from their digital device. On average their human assistant appears within 10 seconds and the feature has been used by about 75% of those with enabled tablets, making it the most popular way to contact customer service.

Catherine Garner

Managing Director
Health & Public Service, Australia and New Zealand

Bronwyn van der Merwe

Director
Fjord Australia

Join the conversation:

	@AccenturePubSvc
	@Fjord
	@AccentureDigi

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How to meet liquid expectations in digital government

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