Many government organisations that we work with typically place great community experience, as part of their core operating policy. What nobody could have predicted is how Covid and its unforeseen and ongoing impacts have driven a renewed focus on digital customer experience in our daily world, especially when we interact with government agencies and services.
This word for this renewed focus is immediacy. Sure, one could argue that governments have always strived towards ensuring expediency in community experiences, and we would agree that most of the time governments aim to develop efficiencies to achieve this. However, Covid has interrupted and permanently altered the ability to deliver great community experience. This requires a major shift in how government organisations, departments and agencies need to respond to the new challenges.
More specifically, let’s talk about a few examples of document related challenges that we are seeing across public organisations that have changed experience expectation.
- Work from home – employees are no longer in the office to walk and drop forms, approvals or documents to. This is causing delays in response times for internal and community/resident facing processes.
- Agreements / Contracts – sure a good portion of our public institutions had simple digital signatures in place, but they also had staff and people to manage the same processes. With the impact of absenteeism and staff shortages, you have situations where contract execution gets delayed, purchasing deadlines are missed and projects are impacted, contributing to major delays and cost blow outs.
- Onboarding New Hires – previously employees would physically attend the office, sign their forms, provide them to the HR department, and be setup with system access along with payroll ready to go. Covid has disrupted the way onboarding works changing the experience for new employees.
Addressing the Challenges
Regrettably, we hear these types of stories and resulting impacts more and more often in this new Covid-impacted environment in which we all work and live.
However, we also hear the stories of identifying the issues or mitigating risks before they become actual problems.
These challenges shouldn’t be written off as excuses, rather they are disruptive factors that absolutely need to be understood to be addressed.
While the challenges in effectively managing these processes are great and many, knowing what you’re up against is key to implementing the right solutions. Nobody wants to be left reacting to easily preventable issues.
For example, through new ways of looking at digitisation, whether it be electronic signature, updates in contract lifecycle management or most importantly improving process efficiency, you can enable your organisation to drive immediacy to meet the new demands of community and staff.
Don’t know where to start? We do.
Our work across multiple tiers of government enables us to have the conversations that matter.
We focus on bringing you our experience and insight to understand those risks and mitigation activities, to help you to assess your unique situation and determine next best steps. If those next steps require a technology solution, then you know you are working with a partner that can support your needs and protect you from the risks that have risen in this new environment.
Ensure your government organisation can deliver immediacy and meet the desired experience demanded by your customers.
Reach out to learn more about how we can help you.