Three simple ways local councils can enhance community services

As local governments across New Zealand embrace digital transformations to create efficiencies, save money, enable data-driven decision making and provide residents with greater access to council resources, an industry study reports that 19 per cent of New Zealanders report that they will never use digital services.

Commissioned by global ERP software company TechnologyOne, independent economics consultants IBRS conducted the largest evaluation of citizens’ thoughts on government services, which found that while investments in Software-as-a-Service solutions for central and local government have been largely successful, more must be done to improve engagement.

Local government online services were found to be actively used by 50% of the citizens surveyed, with the most highly rated desired improvement was to ‘make information easier to find’ (30%) and ‘make it clearer how to do things or get service.’ (28%). An analysis of participant comments suggested that poor digital literacy, accessibility for citizens without computers, impersonal support, wait times and privacy concerns were frequently cited reasons for residents’ hesitation to engage with digital services.

IBRS Senior Advisor Dr Joseph Sweeney said: “Local government digital services are at the coalface of complex, high-touch citizen services, yet lack the scale needed to deliver highly empathic digital service. Rather than focusing on big innovations that require significant investment, councils can make small steps that focus on enriching existing digital services with a human-touch to educate and guide citizens through the service.”

According to the researcher, digital service delivery could be made far more effective without significant new investments in the technology, instead by employing simple empathetic design principles to improve engagement with digital services:

1. Simplify navigation: Review existing interfaces and consider if there is a sufficient overview of the process and instructions are written in clear, concise, and easy-to-understand language. Incorporate visual aids such as infographics, visual workflows and video tutorials to supplement written instructions to enhance user comprehension.

2. Ensure all services are mobile-ready: Adopt a mobile-first design approach, ensuring digital services are easily accessible and functional on mobile devices. This allows citizens to reach services even when access to computers and fixed-location internet is limited. Review existing services on various mobile platforms for usability and test with citizens from diverse backgrounds.

3. Always provide a human touch: Rather than attempting to improve digital service delivery with new systems and services, it may be more effective to prioritise capabilities that free up human agents from internal activities such as automating manual and repetitive activities and reallocating human resources to provide 1:1 support to residents.

TechnologyOne’s innovative Digital Experience Platform (DxP LG) was developed with empathetic design front-of-mind to enable local government to deliver better outcomes, better experience and enable data-driven decisions for their community. DxP LG provides residents with an intuitive platform allowing them to interact with their council anywhere, anytime and from any device.

TechnologyOneNew Zealand Country Manager John Mazenier said: “By integrating empathic design principles with robust SaaS capabilities, local councils can bridge the digital divide among their residents and improve customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs via self-service and ease of access to information. DxP LG puts simplicity in the hands of the community. Councils get a range of inquiries every day from their residents, so we provided a platform that provides a solution for many of the issues.”

“With more than 36 years’ experience working with local governments across New Zealand, we know that councils will always put their community first. Customer experience is the next frontier, and empathetic design will be key to getting it right.”

Read more New Zealand Digital Citizens Continuing the Journey with Empathy