Border services: get to know me

Get to Know Me, the second trend in this year’s Accenture Technology Vision, explores how technology-driven interactions are expanding digital footprints for every citizen. For Border agencies, this provides an unprecedented opportunity to unlock the value in the data they collect and in turn build more hyper-personalised services. Organisations, including many in public service, are moving beyond one-off transactions and into a seamless flow of exchanges with individuals and businesses.

But it’s an opportunity that’s accompanied by significant responsibility. The success of those relationships will depend on the degree of trust that they inspire. Without that, citizens may decline to interact with new services. For example, using autonomous agents, such as Fetch.AI, hyper-personalisation of a traveller’s journey (from idea to booking through to post-journey) can deliver a completely unique experience. With the permission and approval of the user, these artificial intelligence-powered agents could truly understand the traveller, their habits, and their preferences, and then in turn offer a fully personalised end-to-end journey. The same principle can be applied to the trade or traveller ecosystems. Border agencies can develop “360 degree” views of their customers, learning how to better engage with them and how to strengthen relationships – as well as greatly improving trust.

The degree of personalisation that border agencies pursue should depend on a careful understanding of the line between what citizens will perceive as valuable and what they’ll view as intrusive. With seventy four percent of public service leaders expecting the amount of data they collect about citizens to increase either exponentially or significantly within the next two years, they will need to ensure that they use that wealth of information with care. For example, travellers need to feel that the reason a Border agency wants to get to know them is to provide help and not to help themselves. As Border agencies develop seamless trade flows or traveller journeys, using new innovations such biometric boarding or global initiatives such as OneID or Known Traveller Digital Identity, it is critical that citizens feel secure about the personal data being exchanged and experience the benefits of sharing their data. For the agency, a clear advantage is that they can perform more targeted enforcement, which will also mean known travellers are stopped less frequently.

So how should Border agencies move forward? Through a more granular understanding of their customers, Border agencies can offer rich individual experiences for both the trade and traveller ecosystems. Moving beyond a “transactional” view and creating deep relationships with customers, while also using technology to deliver personalisation, will differentiate leading Border agencies. Most importantly, they must ensure that they use the knowledge they have about every customer to determine the limits of acceptable personalisation.

I’m interested to know the types of personalised services that your agency offers. How did you ensure you got the right balance when creating them?