Government services must align with citizen behaviours online.
An industry colleague shared his friend’s recent social media government customer experience with a large government agency. The friend had witnessed an incident in public, captured some footage on his smartphone and then tried to contact the agency to share what he’d seen in the interest of public safety.
He tried to call to the agency with details, but his call went unanswered. He then tried to contact the agency privately via social media with details of the incident and the footage. While he was thanked, he was told by the service agent he needed to complete a form with all the necessary details for the issue to be logged in their system.
At that point, he just gave up.
A citizen trying to provide valuable information on a public issue gave up because the agency he was trying to help couldn’t help him. Yes, the agency had a Facebook page, but its focus was limited to informing citizens, not helping them. The processes put in place to manage citizen queries simply didn’t meet expectations.
Public servants recognise the need to change and resolve known barriers.
While they acknowledge there is work to be done, many government agencies are already taking positive steps to address these sorts of customer experience gaps.
Propel recently participated in the Queensland Government’s Digital Capability Uplift Supplier Day facilitated by Transport & Main Roads (TMR). More than 200 public servants came to hear how their people can develop the skills required to design and deliver citizen-centric services.
In conversation, many recognised the growing expectations of citizens to receive seamless, responsive service online. But they also highlighted the often frustrating internal barriers preventing these expectations being met, such as:
- Concerns among leaders around the risks of engaging citizens via social media, leading agencies to focus on controlled broadcast communication over service;
- Individual teams wanting to own their own social media profiles but failing to integrate back office systems, contributing to a confusing or frustrating experience for citizens seeking answers;
- Perceptions that social media conversations are not secure, forcing service agents to refer citizens from social media to more established service channels (phone, email, branch); and
- Questions around the cost of extending service capabilities into social media, resulting in agencies half committing to service via social media.
Encouragingly, everyone I spoke with wanted to fix things. Everyone. From General Managers to Capability Advisors to Communications Leads. From service delivery to HR to policy. There is appetite to change and TMR has created great momentum to help them do so. Agencies now are just looking for examples to guide them.
How do leading government agencies improve customer experience with social media?
Later that day I presented to a group of public servants responsible for improving CX across Queensland Government, tackling the question: how can social media enhance citizen experience?
I shared stories from a range of industry leaders to help the group see what’s possible with social media but three lessons in particular stood out:
1. Give your audience a chance to contribute. While NASA employs some of the smartest scientists on the planet (and off it…), even it recognises the need to harness the collective intelligence of its online community. By providing opportunities for citizens to participate in solving complex space challenges online, NASA has built incredible brand loyalty and trust while shortening R&D timeframes from 3-5 years to 3-6 months.
2. Recognise and respond to your target audience’s behaviours. When making a business investment decision, people want to know who they’re talking to and the company they keep rather than a faceless brand. The Department of Premier & Cabinet established more than 1,000 industry connections and achieved 4x greater performance on content by empowering staff to engage industry on a personal level via their own social media profiles.
3. Harness your stakeholder’s questions to save time and money. Given it deals with highly sensitive matters around airport and traveller safety, the Transport Security Administration (TSA) has plenty of reasons to avoid social media. But by embracing traveller preferences for social media engagement, the TSA responds to traveller queries and shares their experiences with others to ultimately reduce airport wait times and increase traveller satisfaction, and limit on-ground staffing costs.
Social media programs don’t need to be ‘remarkable’, they just need to work. Simply, quickly and as intuitively as possible for citizens. And these leading industry examples show it all starts by listening and responding to the needs of their stakeholders.
If your team is on this journey and would benefit from either social media training or gaining inspiration from our previous government and corporate experience, drop me a note to talk.
Additional note: if you work in the public sector and are looking for examples, insights and evidence to help make your social media business case, download our Government social media resource: Enhancing the citizen experience in PDF version or via our blog.
