How Identity Management Can Drive Improved Citizen Experience

Citizen Experience is a focus of government agencies from federal to state and local. Governments are working to give citizens the same service experience they get as consumers in the commercial market. A huge piece of this is understanding who the citizen is and creating a "journey" tailored to their needs. This starts with the rather technical and security-minded practice of identity management.

Traditionally, identity management has been viewed as a way to enable access to systems for a workforce. It is the practice that assures that the proper people have access to the technology and systems they need. If we look at it in the context of citizen service, identity management is more than giving people access to their accounts. It is about giving people and systems that serve citizens insight to how they can better serve each citizen. In fact, a well-thought out identity management strategy can proactively offer applicable programs related to public health and social services.

Identity management is playing a role as part of robotic process automation (RPA) solutions designed to speed up benefits to citizens. In an effort to improve the turnaround time for loan distribution during national crises, RPA can enable a compilation of an applicant's record from multiple systems, channels, and service providers for collection and entry into systems for underwriters to analyze. Identity management is key to achieving 10 to 100 times faster processing, ensuring that the person applying for the aid is who they say they are.

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The Next Frontier of Citizen Experience

Citizen Experience is a focus of the President's Management Agenda and the resulting IT Modernization Centers of Excellence. This focal point is a result of government receiving poor customer service marks (ranking them on par or below cable companies) year after year. Agencies have evolved from requiring citizens to visit a government office to fill out sheets of paperwork to online portals that provide much of that same paperwork online. It quickly became clear, however, that simply moving paperwork online was not the answer to improving citizen experience with government. Today the technology exists to take that online interaction to the next level.

Social media, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), video chat, text, and chatbots are being used throughout government to give citizens a more direct and personalized digital line to the agencies that serve them. Cities are using IoT to better communicate the whereabouts and schedule of public transport as well as air quality levels. AI is powering website chatbots and search functions allowing for more self-service of citizens looking to conduct business with the government 24/7.

But technology alone will not improve the government's customer service scores. The culture and morale of the government workforce also plays a huge role in the service that is delivered to citizens. Service representatives in government should be trained on new systems and shown how technologies will enhance, rather than replace, their jobs. Continue reading

Improving the Citizen Experience With Government Services

In 2011, President Obama announced "Improved Customer Service" as a cross-agency priority. Since then, a concerted effort has been put forth to improve the citizen experience with government services. The goal was for each agency to develop a customer service plan that included ways to use technology to improve the customer experience. Agencies posted the plans on their Open Government websites in October 2011, with the goal to build on these plans to streamline and improve customer service delivery.[Tweet "Improving the Citizen Experience With Government Services #GovEventsBlog"]

Since then, the "digitization of government" has become a hot trend followed by the media. More and more agencies are moving formerly cumbersome and paper-intensive processes online as Internet access via smart phones and other devices has become prevalent. All this work has resulted in some positive outcomes. Continue reading