How and when do customers want to engage your services? Why do they come to your department? What related services would they like to access at the same time?
Engagement improves when agencies understand how to better serve their customers and provide transparency around their services. That requires thinking from and organizing around the customer’s point-of-view, whether those customers are members of the public, members of industry, or other government employees.
But it’s not enough to ask the questions. The success or failure around customer engagement is related to how you communicate across the various touchpoints in response to the answers.
For more and more governments, that means taking a platform approach to customer engagement. A platform approach leverages optimized, end-to-end business operations using cloud software to unify people, process, and technology. Thinking about modernization efforts on a platform provides many benefits, allowing you to:
Prioritize Customer Behavior
Traditionally, government has been organized in ‘service silos.’ When a citizen wants a passport, they go to the passport office. When they want a driver’s license, they go to the DMV, and so on. Likewise, members of industry often submit data or file paperwork with disparate agencies to comply with regulatory obligations.
A platform approach forces agencies to rethink the way their services are organized, to break down service silos, and focus on how customers engage these services. When all of your customer data is stored on one system, you can more easily provide visibility both internally and externally for the streamlined services that rival the commercial world.
Maximize Staff Resources
A robust platform allows agencies to stay focused on transformational outcomes. When agencies get bogged down by technology acquisition, alignment, upgrades, and other aspects of IT maintenance and operations, they can lose sight of the business outcomes they’re trying to achieve. The right platform aligns with agency outcomes while removing the burden of day-to-day concerns.
Accelerate Procurement
Because government-funded projects are often funded individually, they go through an enormous approval process with multiple steps, over and over again. Selecting a platform allows agencies to go through the process once. After a platform has been selected, agencies can take advantage of economies of scale and leverage the platform to speed up innovation delivery.
Deliver Innovation
Platforms were designed with innovation in mind. The scalability of a platform helps agencies continue to add new business functions, integrate data from external systems, and build apps using low code. Maintaining service, outreach, and application development efforts using one platform allows departments to add value more quickly and easily.
Personalize Experiences
The commercial sector has changed the expectations of customers. Amazon, for instance, delivers personalized services and curated content. They know the consumer’s interests and use that information to provide a customized experience.
A platform approach makes the same experience possible with government services. If a customer consumes a service from one agency, it’s an opportunity to predict if they’ll need related services from other agencies. Platform technology can facilitate the type of intelligence and understanding needed to create a 360- degree view of the agency customer.
Ready to improve the customer user experience but unsure where to start? Salesforce’s Digital Transformation Journey Guidebook provides a step-by-step guide for IT modernization that any department can follow.
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