10x improvement in customer experience
Combining digital public infrastructure like digital identity with tools like human-centered design can help governments significantly enhance customer experience.
Modern governments do a lot. They provide education, they build roads, they maintain public safety, and much more. But for many people, their view of government is shaped by their individual experiences of specific, individualized services that governments provide to them. In recent years, and partly inspired by strong progress in the private sector, governments have increasingly rallied around a mandate to deliver excellent customer experience. While the private sector has found that keeping customers at the center of their operations improves their overall performance, similar realization is taking root in governments.
Our picture of government is often our most recent experience waiting in line at a department of motor vehicles or filing a tax form or calling to ask about the schedule for local recycling collection. Citizens, long used to a seamless and frictionless experience in the private sector, tend to expect the same from government organizations. A Deloitte 2023 survey of 5,800 individuals across 13 countries found that customer satisfaction from digital government services is 21 percentage points behind the private sector. However, if governments can enhance customer experience, it can be more than just a benefit to customers; it has the potential to fundamentally improve the relationship of the public to its government. In fact, our research has shown that perceptions of government customer experience are a good predictor of trust in government.1
Historically, improving customer experience has been a cumbersome and expensive process. Updating forms, developing technology systems, streamlining processes, and adding staff are all costly and time-consuming. Today, a range of tools offer possibilities to improve customer experience faster and more directly. From businesses applying for licenses online to individuals using a digital ID to access welfare benefits, digital services are helping governments provide human experiences that are efficient, inclusive, and address citizen needs.
Governments now have compelling enablers for excellent customer experience
Deloitte’s global research has found that digital public infrastructure (DPI) is one of the most effective tools to bring radical improvements in customer experience. DPI is a suite of standards and platforms—such as digital identity, digital payments, and data exchange systems—that helps governments deliver essential services to citizens at scale. DPI is also a philosophy based on open, networked technology that serves the public interest. It is supported by communities that are robustly incentivized to innovate for the public good.
DPI has the potential to make services seamless. It can simultaneously cut costs, deliver inclusive services at scale, and foster innovation. DPI represents rails on which user-friendly products and services are built. This infrastructure has the power to reshape aspects of entire economies—and leave them more resilient. DPI has been shown to empower people, especially in remote and underserved areas, with access to essential services like health care, education, and financial services.2 It can also empower ecosystems of innovators to help make government services better.
The interoperable and reusable building blocks of DPI—including digital identity, payments, and data exchange—combine in a myriad of ways. They provide a groundwork on which to build customizable approaches suitable for governments of all sizes. Further, with a shared platform for hundreds of digital services, governments can avoid creating a patchwork of fragmented online services, transform more efficiently, and structure themselves to systematically prioritize how end users experience their services.
Governments can also benefit from other enablers for customer experience beyond DPI. For example, human-centered design has gained popularity; increasingly public servants understand how to apply design techniques to effectively imagine and create compelling service experiences.
Governments have also made significant progress in adopting structures to promote customer experience, including by creating chief customer experience officers in key agencies. And perhaps most importantly, governments have seen excellent progress in debunking the value of some of the traditional barriers to great customer experience.3 For example, while information technology has sometimes been seen as a high-risk, costly necessity, leading practices now allow IT to be fully symbiotic with investments in customer experience. Governments have made considerable progress building and adopting common technology enablers that they can build once but use repeatedly. Conducting user research, using agile methodologies, and incorporating iterative development processes not only improve customer experience but also help agencies mitigate the risk of costly technology failures.
Bringing customer experience to life
Ukraine’s Diia app shows the potential of a well-established DPI for radically improving customer experience. The app was designed to make government services more seamless and efficient. Incorporating key DPI building blocks such as digital identity, data-sharing, and payments processing, as of 2024 the Diia app allows more than 19 million users to experience over 100 government services in fundamentally new ways.4 The development of the app was essentially based on a presidential mandate to put government in everybody’s pocket.
The app enables Ukrainians to obtain the world’s first-ever digital passport, acquire a digital driving license, register newborns, file taxes, and transact with banks.5 The platform has also proved remarkably adaptable. In the wake of the pandemic, the Ukrainian government used Diia to launch COVID-19 vaccination certificates. As the war unfolded, Diia streamlined payments for internally displaced persons. When homes had to be rebuilt after being damaged in the war, Diia launched its eRecovery service for convenient fund disbursement.6
Diia represents more than just digital for digital’s sake. Improved customer experience built on DPI represents the future of how citizens could interact with their governments.
Breaking trade-offs
Traditionally, better customer experience required additional staff. Companies or agencies had to hire more call center workers, more social care workers, and more tax processers. Even with costlier additional resources, there was no guarantee that the benefits would extend to all citizens.
Digitally connected populations change that math. Governments can provide services directly through digital platforms. Citizens need not visit government offices to avail themselves of government services; the services are available wherever and whenever citizens can connect. These efficiencies also extend to people who prefer not to connect digitally—even people phoning, mailing, and visiting agencies benefit from public servants who have better tools to process and manage analog transactions. DPI-enabled customer experience can break the traditional trade-off between service and cost. In this context, thoughtful designers, strategists, and technologists have an unprecedented suite of tools to provide exponential improvements to customer experience.
Seamless service delivery relies on DPI’s role as a digital backbone that facilitates digital interactions with government. DPI’s interoperable, reusable, and open-source technologies can reduce cost, increase efficiency, and eliminate the need to develop custom technology for every digital service. These improvements allow staff to do more with less. Moving up the technology stack creates efficiencies in service delivery. It also allows staff to segment their customer base by those seeking or requiring no-touch, low-touch, and high-touch experiences based on customer needs. For example, Deloitte’s 2023 survey revealed only 17% of surveyed individuals aged 55 and above engaged with governments digitally regularly. Lower administrative burden and better understanding of the customer base can help public servants to deliver more personalized human attention to more people who want it and provide self-service digital services to others. This approach leads to better customer experience without enhancing resources proportionately.
Convergence: The key to 10x change in customer experience
Better customer interactions not only reduce the “time tax,” that is, the time taken to access government services, but also build goodwill toward future interactions with the government.7 Achieving a 10x improvement in customer experience involves leveraging a combination of tools in addition to DPI. Governments are actively investing in digital infrastructure to ensure universal access to digital services, including initiatives such as broadband expansion, public Wi-Fi zones, and digital literacy programs.
To build, operate, and use DPIs, government agencies should take a human-centered design approach, establish shared governance processes and standards, and work with the technology ecosystem to make full use of emerging technologies. This harmonious medley of the right tools, technologies, and policies can result in tangible and measurable improvement in customer experience. Here are examples of simple frameworks for conceptualizing the potential impact of DPI:
- Data-sharing + public-private partnerships + data governance = Personalized customer experience at lower costs
- Digital infrastructure + participatory policymaking + shared incentives = Innovative customer-centric solutions
- Machine learning + robotic process automation + data exchange = Predictive customer journey mapping
Trend in action
Although varying from country to country, common DPIs include digital identity, digital payments, and data exchanges. Like any other interoperable technology, the power of DPI comes from combining these three blocks. Together, DPIs enable governments, the private sector, and non-profits to build services and functionalities on top of DPI building blocks. Even though DPI is “public,” it most effectively realizes its full potential when it is supported by an active ecosystem, including an innovative private sector that uses and supports DPI as a fundamental tool to develop new business models and make existing business services more accessible.
Understanding the building blocks of better customer experience
DPI serves as the foundation upon which to build user-friendly digital products for large populations. There are three major components to DPI that can help improve customer experience: digital identity; digital payment, and data exchange.
Digital identity: Being able to prove who you are—using an authorized identity—enables people to receive secure government services and participate in the digital economy. Leading practices focus on self-sovereign identity that allow individuals to control their personal data. These approaches focus on empowering verifiable entities to engage in trusted transactions. Several countries have launched digital ID projects, none bigger than India’s. The country’s journey to develop DPI began with Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique digital identity that serves as the verification of a person’s name, address, date of birth, and gender.8 Aadhaar serves as the cornerstone of a system that delivers public welfare schemes to farmers, the elderly, and underprivileged residents, among others. Aadhaar also offers secure authentication for services offered by the private sector. These range from banking, to insurance, to telecom needs like setting up a new internet connection.9 Linking Aadhaar with bank accounts helped India directly deposit cash at an unprecedented scale and speed during COVID-19. The government of India directly transferred US$3.9 billion to 318 million beneficiaries within two weeks of announcing cash transfer program during the pandemic.10 Aadhaar has facilitated nearly US$400 billion of direct benefit transfers to date, and in the last five years, the government has processed more than 27 billion beneficiary transactions through Aadhaar. Over the fiscal year 2022 to 2023 alone, the direct benefit transfer schemes transferred cash to over 730 million beneficiaries.11 As of March 2022, direct benefit transfer had resulted in a cumulative savings of US$33 billion, equivalent to nearly 1.14% of India’s gross domestic product.12
Digital payments: Digital payment systems enable governments, individuals, and businesses to transact securely and easily. Unlike digital IDs, multiple digital payment systems can act as DPIs as long as they are interoperable. Generally, these systems collect and deliver payments instantaneously and work around the clock. India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI), Brazil’s Pix, Europe’s TARGET Instant Payment Settlement, US's FedNow, and Türkiye’s The Instant and Continuous Transfer of Funds System are some examples of interoperable DPI payment systems. Launched in November 2020, in its first 13 months, Brazil’s Pix had 109 million individual users and more than 7.6 million businesses. The numbers include 45 million users who did not have access to digital financial services before Pix.13 In India, for the fiscal year from 2022 to 2023, the total value of UPI transactions was nearly 50% of the country’s nominal GDP.14 Such payment systems can improve financial inclusion in a country and help government transfer instantaneous cash benefits to underserved community.
Data exchange: Data exchanges connect disparate systems, including identity and payment. Data exchange systems enable the seamless, secure, and consent-based sharing of data between governments, individuals, and businesses. Data exchanges are important to resilient service delivery and can be pivotal in a crisis when speed is often paramount. World Bank research during COVID-19 found that countries with digital data exchange platforms, on an average, were able to reach 51% of their population for cash transfer; in contrast, the ones without it were able to transfer cash to just 16% of the population.15 Data exchanges also play a key role in implementing the once-only principle, which asserts that citizens should only have to give their information to the government once.
Government agencies, in turn, should bear the responsibility of sharing data in appropriate and privacy-respecting ways. To the extent permitted by law and policy, data exchanges enable multiple agencies to share data and insights from their data, to avoid burdening individuals and businesses with repeatedly entering the same information. Such DPIs may also allow private service providers access to data to offer a range of financial, health care, and educational services to individuals. For example, an applicant for a loan could authorize the government to send tax data to the bank. DPIs used to share personal data can secure informed consent, establish personal data protection, and provide trusted data-sharing mechanisms. Data exchanges can even include a public-facing component for non-personal data, helping them meet their goals with regards to open data.
Europe’s “once-only technical system” enables public authorities of various countries to exchange information across the border.16 Ukraine’s data exchange platform, Trembita, has facilitated more than 3 billion data-sharing transactions since its launch in 2020.17 The platform is named after the Ukrainian word for a wooden horn, the term used by highlanders to call people to congregate for occasions like births, weddings, and funerals. Just like the horn, the data platform acts as a means of communication, albeit digitally, between Ukrainians and 201 state and local bodies.18 Trembita is modeled after Estonia’s pioneering X-tee data platform, which is used by 1,200 organizations, facilitates 2.2 billion transactions annually, and supports 3,000 online services.19
Combining building blocks to improve customer experience
Building and deploying DPI takes more than simply rolling out individual building blocks of digital identity, payment, and data exchange systems. It is about designing them in such a way that the building blocks are interoperable to allow services to develop using DPI as a foundation. DPI is an intermediate layer of the digital ecosystem. It sits on top of traditional physical technology layers (servers, data centers, devices, and routers) and supports front-end app layers like telehealth, social care, cash transfers, and e-learning. DPI can also be supplemented by additional platform services that create efficiencies and harmonize customer experience such as artificial intelligence-enabled chatbots for answering queries or auto-filling forms.
The direct benefit transfer program in India provides an example of how the building blocks of DPI combine to deliver services in a new way. Aadhaar provides the identity layer, which connects to a data layer to identify whether an individual is eligible for a welfare program.20 The payment infrastructure, Aadhaar Payment Bridge, maps an Aadhaar identity onto an individual’s bank account to complete a direct deposit. Individual DPIs won’t suffice, but the interoperable nature of DPIs enables the systems to communicate together to complete the task.21
Estonia, another leader in interoperable and reusable DPIs, used them to remove extraneous information requests from the citizen’s experience.22 Before 2019, 97% of Estonian parents had to apply for one or more of 10 types of family benefits available when a child is born. To receive the allowance, parents would fill in the required details and supporting documents for each benefit. Officials would study the forms, calculate the benefits manually, and then grant them. It took about two hours for officials to process each application.23
In October 2019, Estonia’s Social Insurance Board launched a proactive family benefit service where parents don’t even have to apply in order to receive family benefits, making it a frictionless experience. The Social Insurance Board developed an automated IT system that sends a nightly query to the Estonian National Population Register via X-tee (their data exchange DPI) for data on new births. Based on the digital ID of parents, other registries, like the Tax and Customs Board, share data to determine who is eligible for which benefits. The system follows the principle of once-only by not reaching out to parents for information it already has.24
After collecting all of this information, the Social Insurance Board proactively populates the benefits data on the family's self-service portal. Once parents hit the confirm button, the money is automatically transferred to their accounts. The process now takes just 30 seconds. As of 2023, 99.99% of births in Estonia were automatically checked for eligibility. The result: a 91% service satisfaction rate and 88% reduction in need for parents to contact government workers.25
Türkiye experienced similar benefits after it implemented its Integrated Social Assistance System (ISAS). ISAS integrates data from 22 public bodies and offers 112 digital services. Before ISAS, a paper-based application system required 17 documents related to land, vehicle, and tax registration. ISAS integrates citizen’s unique ID with personal information like financial status, household income, work status, and ownership of property, agricultural land, and vehicles. Integration reduced the required documents from 17 to just one—a national ID number. Thanks to this system, application time has fallen from days to minutes. Processing and benefit delivery time has been cut from months to days.26
Government doesn’t need to do it all
The size and scale of DPI can be intimidating. After all, even the biggest corporations in the world don’t need to authenticate the identities of more than a billion “customers” as India’s Aadhaar does. But governments do not need to build and manage every DPI tool themselves. A wide ecosystem of partners opens access to needed technologies and speeds user adoption.
Governments can find partners who already have existing solutions that fit their DPI needs. Often, this means finding “where your users are.” If the bulk of a user group communicates on a messaging app, you may not need to create a stand-alone app, but rather can incorporate a chatbot into a messaging app. Similarly, many governments are using existing commercial identity solutions as part of their digital identity block of DPI.
But commercial and non-profit partners can also benefit from and contribute to DPI. DPIs can enhance efficiency and cut down operating costs for private organizations. The ability of business to verify customers remotely, for example, simplifies verification and can improve the experience for customers.
In India, banks and other financial institutions have been significant beneficiaries of DPI. The cost to onboard a customer in India has come down from US$23 to US$0.1, a 230x improvement.27 This can create a positive feedback loop that benefits government, where DPI makes business easier, which attracts more users, which in turn, creates greater social benefit. For example, implementation of various DPIs have played a critical role in improving financial inclusion in India. The country’s bank account ownership, which was 25% in 2008, jumped to 80% a decade later. That journey would have taken nearly five decades if not for DPI.28
My take
User-centric technology in Estonia helps deliver seamless services to citizens
Luukas Ilves, chief information officer and undersecretary ofdigital transformation, Estonia; and Kaili Tamm, chief digital officer, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, Estonia29
Digital government is not new to Estonia. We started our journey almost three decades ago but, with a goal of improving services for the public, we are still driven to progress.
Estonia’s digital government ecosystem has benefitted from the fact that we focused on two key items early on: identity and data. Our national electronic identity (e-ID) system and X-Road data exchange layer have together positioned us at the forefront of efficient public service delivery, with almost zero marginal cost for creating new services.
We believe in building ecosystems, both domestically and globally. Today, the X-Road (X-tee in Estonia) data platform is used by 1,200 organizations (the majority of which are private) and facilitates 2.2 billion transactions annually and supports 3,000 online services.30 X-Road has even been implemented outside of Estonia in over 20 countries around the world.31
The combination of key technology elements with a digital ecosystem can produce real benefits for the public. Our focus is on building personalized services that are tailored to the needs of individual users and to minimize administrative burden. This builds on our current efforts to develop life events–based services. Take the birth of a child as an example. Utilizing X-Road, the system sends nightly queries to the National Population Register for data on new births, cross-referencing information from various registries through digital IDs, such as the Tax and Customs Board, to efficiently determine eligibility. This allows proactive delivery of financial benefits to new parents without the need for extra bureaucracy.
The same principles can improve services in other domains as well. For instance, in health care, personalized medicines can lead to a more proactive approach in identifying and reaching out to individuals with specific health risks. In education, we can start offering more tailored curricula.
Whether delivering benefits to citizens or registering a business, we believe the objective of digital government in Estonia is clear: to seamlessly combine technology and service delivery to maximize the benefit our people receive from public services.
What the 10x future holds
- Leverage the power of DPIs to create seamless services: Combining multiple DPIs like identity, payment, and data exchange platforms can help agencies deliver frictionless services. Citizens receive pre-filled forms based on accurate income data, streamlining filing. Use of AI ensures precise assessments, with real-time updates and notifications for timely submissions.
- Personalized service delivery: A service tailored to the individual’s needs, interests, and circumstances, enabled by digital infrastructure, can enhance customer experience and put governments on par with the leading private sector organizations.
- Predictive government: Like leading e-commerce and over-the-top media platforms, governments collect enough data to understand and predict the needs of citizens. With interoperable and connected infrastructure and the use of AI, governments cannot only predict needs but meet them instantly.
- Services for unplanned events: As governments’ digital infrastructure matures, agencies will not only be able to deliver life event services around predictable events like birth of a child or enrollment in higher education but also create resilient digital capacity that will enable agencies to stand up and deliver new services within days for unplanned events like pandemic or disasters.
Steps you can take now
To achieve 10x increases in customer experience, governments should consider:
- Establish a modern data exchange: New technologies can help lay the foundation for new customer experiences. Developing integrated data management systems can promote the once-only principle where customers need to provide information just once to use multiple services.
- Invest in customer experience measurement platforms: These platforms track an individual’s experience to identify citizen needs and prioritize improvements to the customer journey. Better data drives better design, and better design drives citizen satisfaction.
- Combine the use of AI with human centered design: Integrate and use AI and generative AI with human-centered design principles to improve the customer experience and deliver personalized and accessible services.
- Balance efficiency with privacy: Strong foundational layers of DPI like identity, payments, and data-sharing help build trust and inclusivity among citizens. However, a reliable consent network is key to balancing government’s need for efficiency with citizens' need for privacy.32
- Embrace reusable technologies: Reusable and modular technologies can help governments adopt and develop affordable and flexible technologies. Many of these technologies are open source and are designed to significantly enhance data interoperability, leading to an improvement in speed and scale of service delivery by leaps and bounds.
- Build an ecosystem of users and partners: Attract partners and users from the start. Governments should invite market players to develop services on top of DPI that attract users and help deliver inclusive scalable services.