Fostering real connection

The pandemic proved to governments around the world that improving how they interact with their citizens in good times as well as bad must become a top priority. Here in Canada, governments at all levels went to exceptional lengths to maintain existing services and provide new ones as they addressed the effects of COVID-19 public health guidelines on jobs, well-being, and community.

As we emerge into a so-called “new normal,” government bodies have a golden opportunity to consolidate the lessons they’ve learned from this rare experience to design new systems and processes to deliver an improved standard of service excellence to the people they serve. Leading governments are now organizing services around common life events and anticipating how people’s needs will change as they navigate those events.

Our new report looks at the five critical structures these governments are discovering can support and shape superior service experiences for their citizens:

1. The experience centre
   Traditional contact-centre models are giving way to experience centres in an intentional shift to move away from simply handling transactions and toward solving problems for citizens. Experience centres aim to deliver a consistent and satisfying experience, regardless of the channel used to seek a public service.
2. The human experience
   Considering the full range and interconnectedness of the events in a person’s life in the design process enables governments to create programs and capabilities that focus on citizen satisfaction. This approach helps them to deliver a seamless experience, build trust, and reinforce a belief in government competence.
3. “No wrong door”
   Modern omnichannel engagement platforms give users an experience in which no choice leads to a dead end. For governments, that means citizens can interact with a centralized platform that holds a record of their service touchpoints, so regardless of where a person begins an interaction—online, phone, SMS, chatbot, email—their request can be completed with a consistent service standard and experience.
4. AI bots for service improvement
   AI can be used to power the expansion of digital self-service by embedding natural language processing capabilities into interactions in self-service channels. This also improves containment rates because AI bots can detect when the user is stuck and prompt them with possible solutions to keep them in their channel of choice.
5. “Tell us once”
   The development of data exchanges and common citizen data elements enables the creation of an integrated view of a citizen’s interaction history across a series of government programs and services. This means that instead of having to provide the same information for every program or agency they want to access, a citizen only has to share it once.

Download the report for more.