Personalising local government services Personalising local government services Personalising local government services

When interacting with a local government organisation, and depending on locality, a ‘customer’ can be anyone, including citizens, taxpayers, tourists, clients, employees and organisations. The challenge today is to effectively serve today’s customers and communities in new ways, ideally with a single timely view of customers to deliver what they have come to expect in terms of service and outcomes amid the modern digital experiences of other service-based organisations.

Enhanced customer outcomes should be a leading priority. With digital technologies making customer-centric personalisation the norm, some organisations are picking up on this signal of changing expectations and taking strategic action to put their own customers at the center of all they do.

Customer service for the digital era has risen to the top of the agenda for Australia’s City of Mitcham, for example, amid increasing public demand for enhanced services. Local authorities there have enacted a comprehensive three-year roadmap for transformation of technology, operations, people and culture, and new reliance on data-based insights, to make customer service and satisfaction a leading priority in all that Mitcham does.

In Saudi Arabia, innovative customer-centric applications like Amana 940 are transforming public services at the ‘street level’. The Amana 940 app lets concerned citizens report to authorities any violations they see that affect or disrupt municipal operations in neighborhoods and along roadways. Citizens can submit a digital photo to authorities using a convenient phone application for quick follow-up and remedial action.

Progress is indeed emerging and, if done well, the ability to connect digitally across organisations can help create a customer-centric community platform that gives customers and businesses unprecedented access to a wide range of personalised digital services.

This concept is discussed in our article on redesigning services – Redesigning services using timely customer data, analytics and insights that are linked to data within other core functions are key to creating customer focused services. Without this data integration capability, getting a 360 degree view of a customer would be impossible. In many countries, local government agencies are the natural choice for such a role, as they are the public-sector organisations that people transact with most often, that have a presence in every community and that take a lead in setting local strategic objectives and driving future prosperity.

All things considered, however, while today’s local organisations have the opportunity to deliver better-connected, trusted, personalised customer services and collaboration, they do have considerable ground to cover, according to research by Forrester Consulting research on behalf of KPMG. Just half (51 percent) believe their customer experience is meeting customer expectations, while only 36 percent believe they are ‘occasionally or consistently’ meeting expectations for a customer-centric experience.¹

To reach the goal of a highly personalised, digitally enabled, customer-centric service model, there are critical milestones that local organisations should achieve on the way. One is to establish a robust and trusted identity-management ecosystem, one that ensures secure data management. Both are critical to giving customers the confidence to engage with organisations digitally. See Building data trust for more on this.

Customers want safety, convenience and reliable self-service. Identity management enables the high level of personalisation that customers expect today. With end-to-end service capabilities that identity management can securely unlock, customers should be positioned to ‘build’ or ‘design’ their own personal and customised experience.

Done well, secure self-service increases customer satisfaction, decreases service costs and enables staff to focus on value-adding tasks rather than transactional activities. Modern functionality should enable a process to be started by the customer, unfold seamlessly through middle-office systems, and be completed with minimal human intervention.

For example, chatbots can help answer a range of questions with a degree of personalisation, as we have seen in the UK, where Cardiff Council’s bilingual English-Welsh chatbot can answer questions based on a user’s address. Meanwhile, local authorities in Victoria, Australia have standardised services through a customer service and request portal. Each request now moves digitally through integration layers to middle office technology and team functions.

Local organisations should also seek to narrow the ‘digital divide’ that exists, in order to include those who are less-connected, typically in older age groups, versus today’s hyper-connected younger customers who are digital natives. Service that encompasses everyone will be crucial in the journey to personalised, custom-centric service. The goal while ‘going digital’ should ideally be to create the best fit of services and capabilities that meet the vastly diverse needs and expectations of all customers.

• Customers expect a timely, personalised service: With personalised services becoming the norm, local organisations face a huge challenge - to create a connected data ecosystem that links their front, middle and back offices.
• Secure identity management system is key: To offer highly personalised, convenient and reliable digital services, customers need to know that their data is safe.

• Narrowing the ‘digital divide’: An effective digital community platform should aim to narrow the ‘digital divide’. Including those less connected is crucial in the journey to personalised, customer-centric service.

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