Auckland, New Zealand’s cosmopolitan yet free lifestyle, surrounded by an abundance of parklands, water and inactive volcanic cones, is a major reason the city is one of the fastest growing and most livable in the world. But also its advanced, technology-oriented approach to the services it offers its 1.7 million residents. A large-scale digitization initiative by the Auckland Council enables citizens to register feedback through a single online portal, report a maintenance issue such as a pothole that needs filling and request a solution, and notify their request to resolution via SMS or email pursue .
While the ease with which citizens can access city services isn’t high on the list of things that make Auckland so appealing, it certainly affects how they experience municipal services. Maintenance requests that used to require 55 steps now take 10 steps thanks to automation. Average customer service call time has decreased by 2.5 minutes; Citizens often don’t need to use the phone because they can do whatever they need online and on mobile devices.
Results like these are within reach when public institutions align themselves with other consumer-centric industries by designing everything with the customer – their citizens and employees – in mind, while reinventing the provision of services to their customers. A better citizen experience is at the heart of this reinvention. In places like Provo, Utah, and San Diego, California, there is a growing recognition that providing smooth, rich, e-commerce-like interactions improves the customer experience, which in turn builds connection and trust with customers. In San Diego, for example, the general public is using a new “Get It Done!” App to register inquiries with the city, for example to repair a sidewalk. The app automatically forwards requests to the work order management system and seamlessly processes thousands of requests per day.
By streamlining and automating processes and systems and using data to support decision-making, agencies are also benefiting from significant efficiency gains that they can then use to create even more value for citizens and employees with fewer resources. Suddenly, the old stigma of the slow, deadlocked and unresponsive bureaucracy no longer applies.
To get an idea of what an agile, customer-centric organization could mean, let’s look at another city in Kiwi, Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island. Christchurch City Council has set out to change the way people treat citizens after an earthquake exposed the flaws in the outdated systems that the city of 380,000 relied on. The basis for this transformation is a publicly accessible digital interface that enables citizens and companies to easily access 46 different city services via multiple channels, including mobile ones. For example, a person can use the portal to request the repair of a broken street lamp while uploading a photo and using a GIS tool to localize the location – all from their mobile device.
Behind the customer-oriented online engagement platform is a cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, which enables seamless integration between citizen-oriented functions, city departments and the resources for fulfilling incoming inquiries. The system processes requests and converts them into work orders, then automatically routes them to the city council’s preferred suppliers and contractors for quick resolution. Inquiries that used to require multiple points of contact and a lot of time to resolve are now often dealt with in hours or days instead of weeks with just one point of contact. Ultimately, the more services citizens can use and the more they can achieve through a single, easy-to-use online engagement platform, the better their experience with these services and the authorities providing them.
As important as this close digital integration is in the normal course of business, it is all the more valuable in a crisis. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the province of Bolzano, Italy, hastily launched a program to provide financial relief for professionals and small businesses. With an end-to-end solution accessed on the community side, provincial officials were able to quickly process, process and fulfill grant applications for voters in need. The same type of solution enabled the city of Hamburg to launch a similar coronavirus grant program worth 50 billion euros. IFB Hamburg, the city’s central funding agency, processed the first applications within 24 hours of the start.
These examples point to the possibilities for public institutions to enrich their experiences when different agencies and resources within the value chain are synchronized with a single source of truth. When multiple agencies, from the federal to the municipal level, are digitally connected and can work with the same data, they get a complete picture of the common target groups they serve. A single, unified view of a person or household creates opportunities to offer predictive, hyper-personalized services. By applying AI and machine learning-driven predictive tools to this data, public institutions can begin proactively providing services to people and keeping them connected for the rest of their lives. A child’s fifth birthday could result in a city’s school system allowing the child’s parents to enroll them in kindergarten. If this child has special educational needs, separate agencies could provide parents with information on programs, new scholarship opportunities, etc. to assist with the child’s journey. It is the agency that initiates the interaction with the citizen, rather than the other way around.
Additionally, companies with experience management capabilities can instantly collect feedback during key points of the citizen journey, analyze that data, and act on it to continuously improve the results of their services. In Provo, Utah, city officials use experience management tools to gather real-time feedback from city residents, analyze that data, and act on it. Robust response rates to surveys on issues such as quality of life, real estate and spatial planning have resulted in a dramatic increase in civic engagement and a wealth of new actionable insights for the city. “We can get real-time information from people,” said then Provo Mayor John Curtis, “and we know what they think about problems.”
As the Christchurch City Council demonstrates, the data also contains valuable business intelligence. Using spatial data technology and analysis, the city can visualize geographic trends in the service requests received (e.g. why are there so many stormwater runoff problems in a neighborhood?) It also gives elected officials a deeper insight into the priorities and needs of member states.
This is exactly the kind of insight public institutions can use to act more like the best business-to-consumer organizations today, and provide the upscale, digitally-assisted avenues that contribute to better quality of life for people they serve.
Paul O’Sullivan is a solution expert in the SAP Public Sector Industry Cloud and Industry Solutions team. Paul has been supporting the public sector at SAP since 2005. He focuses on SAP Public Sector’s solutions for customer experience, grants, and social protection. Paul holds a BSc in Computer Science and Math from University College Cork, Ireland and currently resides outside of the SAP Newtown Square, Pennsylvania office with his wife and two teenage children.
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