As with any other business vertical, governments worldwide face their own peculiar sets of challenges. Historically, governments have never viewed their citizens as their ‘customers’. This shift in ideology is the first huge step that governments have taken. Governments are now adopting customer interaction technologies that enable their customers to deal with them more simply, more efficiently, and most of all, in a manner that encourages compliance and generates goodwill. Given the nature of government and its all pervasive character, it is really several ‘business verticals’ rolled into one, making its task all the more difficult.

What challenges do governments face in their dealings with customers?

E-governance - Automate daily activities to reduce paper work in an effort to serve the citizens better and move to paperless transactions. For example, a particular government body chose to enable filing of taxes over the phone and introduced microfilming to save space and reduce file handling. This was done in an effort to bring in efficiency, speed, and convenience to the practice.

Differentiated customer service - To optimize each customer relationship through differential treatment. For an organization today the major challenge is to cut through the clutter of the existing product and service offers. The next logical step for the organization is to train and enable its agents to be able to use the information in the most appropriate manner. For instance, the organization can have real-time suggestions appearing on its agents' screen, prompting them to interact with the customer in a specific way.

Information dissemination - Citizens and businesses interact with their governments to get information. Government bodies face the challenge of making this information available to them in simple, easy-to-use ways. The need to disseminate information to an expansive population through user friendly channels remains a predominant challenge. Self-service and the choice of self-service channels play an important role here.

Enabling remote transaction - With large numbers of people to be dealt with, government sectors face the challenge of enabling their customers to complete their transactions from remote locations rather than come in to the ‘government office’. Increasingly, customers are being offered the option of doing routine things such as filing of tax returns and payments of statutory dues from their homes and offices.

Minimizing time - People need to interact with the government, practically all the time for a variety of needs. And all these interactions normally require customers to take time out from their normal daily routine to complete them. Customers once sought information from their government. Today, however, governments ensure that information is made available to customers at any location and through their choice of channel. The challenge here is choosing the right channel and technology appropriate to the requirement.

Our experience of managing customer interaction technology and processes across business verticals helps us to understand these challenges and choose and deliver the appropriate solutions for each need.