Delivering Next-Level Services
Technological innovation is such a massive game-changer on so many levels that sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin. For the public sector, there are new tools and channels to engage with citizens in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago.
When you get digital services right, old problems are solved and new offerings are presented with unprecedented precision and speed. Customers go from being ‘jobs to be done’ to ‘people to delight’.
And therein lies my number one tip: customer-centricity must be at the heart of every digital transformation, and it’s where some government departments and agencies blunder.
A McKinsey Center for Government survey of 3,000 public-sector officials across 18 countries found that a staggering 80% of government efforts to deliver digital transformation failed.
This, said the McKinsey report, “represents a huge missed opportunity to tackle society’s greatest challenges more effectively, to give citizens better experiences with government, and to make more productive use of limited public resources. If governments around the world matched their most improved counterparts, they could save as much as $US3.5 trillion a year by 2021 while maintaining today’s levels of service quality.”
That’s a pretty compelling argument to get on with it, but it doesn’t diminish the enormous and complex undertaking that government departments face to deliver end-to-end digital transformations.
The Public Sector consultancy inside Simplus works with agencies to build a realistic transformation roadmap, designed to be on time, on budget and deliver a result that – we hope – is beyond the expectations of staff and citizens alike. “Success simplified” is our mantra and it guides every single one of our projects.
An Opportunity to Turn Your Customers Into a Community
A common challenge in the public sector is consolidating multiple databases, striving to create a single view of all customers from a streamlined platform. Sydney Olympic Park Authority (SOPA) faced just such a challenge.
The sports and entertainment precinct has 14 million visitors a year, four hotels, a growing resident population and hosts some 5000 events annually, yet there were only 100,000 customer records captured – spread across 11 databases! Monthly reports took four days to generate. I get a headache just thinking about it!
Needless to say, there was tremendous enthusiasm from the business groups within SOPA to tackle their digital transformation. Simplus worked with SOPA on a four-month transformation and technology rollout, beginning with a customer-centric approach where each business broke down the touchpoints. The aim was to lift customer service, marketing, reporting and acquisition, which was done using Salesforce platforms including Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Social Studio.
The result is a one-stop-shop for customers. Now, when they make contact with SOPA through email, social media accounts, website forms or phone, the back end of logging and responses is via the same platform. An opt-in marketing cloud expanded that database by 15,000 customers within a few weeks. The third phase of the roll-out is building on this community and creating a two-way dialogue.
The opportunities for SOPA to now engage with their customers directly and personally, is a world away from the disjointed databases they were grappling with when they came to Simplus. As I see it, it’s gold, gold, gold for SOPA!
Think Digital is Just For Young Customers? Think Again.
Digital literacy is strong across all age groups – and you’d jolly well be ready to meet the service expectations of your senior citizens or they will let you know about it!
SA Health had a problem with its Seniors Card. It was a very successful program but the data underpinning it was sitting on multiple systems with no cross-checking. It was, frankly, a mess, and meant that subscribers were getting sent the wrong information and offers.
Working with Simplus, SA Health implemented a Salesforce solution, providing multi-directional integration between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, and synchronising data between the platforms. The implementation enables Sales Cloud to provide a single source of truth for member subscription data and eliminates the need for separate member subscription data on multiple platforms.
The project is also improving the quality of SA Health’s database intelligence, gathering more detailed information when citizens first subscribe for a Seniors Card. This all translated into accurate delivery of the popular digital magazine, better-targeted EDM campaigns and resoundingly positive feedback from business partners and members, which is critical because the Seniors Card Unit generates advertising revenue to support the program.
In the following 12 months, Seniors Card holders reported feeling more connected to their community and and the decline in customer complaints to SA Health about it was the cherry on top: a 100% drop in the past 12 months.
The Seniors Card Simplus Salesforce project has since inspired more opportunities to improve customer service across other business units within SA Health. There’s no arguing the bottom-line value of happy customers. Maybe it’s harder to quantify it for the motivated workforce delivering the services, but we all know it when we see it.
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