Social security institutions should treat participants with respect, dignity and courtesy.
Leadership in citizen services means that institutions’ services are constructed and delivered in a way that makes the most sense for the participants. To serve participants in the manner of their own choosing, public services must transcend agency boundaries, government policies must enable cross-agency collaboration, and government infrastructure must be backed by considerable communication facilities. The pillars of leadership in government services are presented in the following picture.
Addressing the service fundamentals offers the means to meet the base standard of service quality. Higher level service quality entails the need to view the entire institution as a complex delivery system.
Institutions should move beyond basic demographic segmentation and focus more on a participants’ needs and intentions. For example, a government’s old age security agency may focus on educating youth about the benefits of saving for retirement. This might be achieved in a variety of ways such as influencing the school curricula, games, apps, television programmes, etc.
Increasingly, institutions are deepening their understanding of the real drivers of participant satisfaction. These drivers go well beyond responsive call centres and friendly service personnel – participants’ trust in the quality and effectiveness of the service provided and confidence in the providers of the services become more relevant. Fundamentally, every contact with the institution that does not add value to the service experience is an inconvenience to participants, and it represents excess costs for public service delivery Institutions.
Figure 4. The pillars of leadership in government services
Institutions have been investing heavily in new technologies, to innovative service delivery. In many cases, the services have not changed with a resulting widening gap between service provision and service value. To deliver true service value, institutions must focus on business transformation, enterprise architecture, service strategy and policy design to take advantage of current investments and to meet future changes in their environment or their priorities. Delivering on the promise of value-led citizen-centric service requires institutions to lay out the entire business processes and workflows that underpin the fulfilment of service requests with the aim to optimize and where possible automate them.
In parallel with business transformation, institutions must engage in workforce transformation and culture change to achieve their long-term service quality goals. The best public service happens when groups work together toward a shared goal; institutions that recognize this are beginning to create webs of public service value rather than linear value chains.
Forward-thinking institutions are leveraging social media to engage proactively with participants as well as between agencies This active engagement not only provides institutions with a dynamic and relevant understanding of participants’ needs, but it also opens the opportunity for institutions to actively educate participants on social policies, compliance, long-term goals, etc. This effectively allows governments to create a culture of continuous service quality improvement by pushing new services and responding to further requests from the citizens. The figure shows the main concepts concerning a transition from a traditional model based on government push towards a new one based on a collaborative value.
Figure 5. From “Government push” to collaborative value
