Since COVID, Australians from all walks of life have performed an extraordinary pivot. In fact, most of us are conducting more of our personal and business dealings digitally than we did five years ago.

In both personal and business realms, millions of transactions previously performed in the real world now take place virtually, as a matter of course. Whether it’s shopping for groceries, booking our vehicles in for service or consulting healthcare professionals, we want the option to do it online, at times and places that suit us.

It’s the same story in the B2B sphere. Ecommerce is now the most effective sales channel, rated ahead of in-person, video conference, telephone and email by 35 per cent of respondents to the McKinsey global B2B Pulse survey.

Business customers are willing to make significant purchases online, with 70 per cent of decision makers prepared to spend up to $US500,000 on a single ecommerce transaction, the survey revealed.

Suppliers of all stripes have clocked that shift and responded accordingly by ramping up their digital capability and creating the sort of slick, seamless online customer experiences that behemoths like Amazon and eBay have been delivering up as standard for many years.

Citizen consumers

Consequently, a growing number of Australians have come to view themselves, subconsciously at least, as consumers in almost every area of their private and professional lives.

And, increasingly, they’ve begun to expect the same quality, technology-enabled experiences from local, state and federal government as they receive from commercial organisations. Whether they’re receiving them is open to question.

Some administrations have certainly committed to swapping cumbersome, legacy processes and practices for nimble, flexible digital alternatives. Take the state of NSW, for example. In late 2022, its then government announced that its goal was to become the country’s most customer-centric administration by 2030.

“From empowering customers to have more control of how they share personal information in a safe and secure way through the NSW Digital ID program, to never losing or misplacing your birth certificate with the nation-leading Digital Birth Certificate, NSW is delivering digital initiatives for all walks of life,” Victor Dominello, former Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government, noted.

Charting a course

For individual departments and agencies, determining where the digitisation journey should begin can be a sixty-four-million-dollar question.

While the scope may appear endless – and the process overwhelming – focusing on a handful of key ‘pillars’ can illuminate the way forward.

Arguably the most important of these pillars is citizen experience – offering people the same sort of easy-to-use services they’ve become accustomed to accessing in the private sector.

Making the majority of government processes and services available online speeds up processing times and radically increases convenience for ‘customers’, while simultaneously allowing agencies to reduce their operating costs.

Optimising processes

Developing a process-based culture should also be a focus, given it’s the foundation stone for genuine operational efficiency, across both the front and back offices.

An organisation can only reach its full potential when inefficiencies are rigorously eliminated and processes—including the small, ordinary internal ones—are optimised.

That’s where robotic process automation (RPA) technology comes into its own. It can be deployed to automate a vast array of repetitive rule-based tasks and processes across an organisation, to streamline operations, reduce errors and speed response times.

From employee onboarding and records management to internal file sharing, agencies that embrace RPA will typically identify a multitude of opportunities to drive efficiency, minimise frustration and free employees up to focus on higher value activities.

Enabling innovation

Life is a journey, not a destination, as the old saying has it. So, too, is digitisation.

That’s why every public sector transformation initiative should be designed to enable ongoing innovation. There will always be the scope to further improve processes and to respond more effectively to citizens’ needs.

Being well positioned to identify high value opportunities and quickly launch new solutions to address them will enable agencies to sustain the high standard of customer service Australians of today and tomorrow expect and deserve.

Keeping faith with citizens

It’s no surprise that consumers prefer easy, consistent experiences. To drive better engagement with citizens, the State should also provide transparent, straightforward and efficient experiences that match those interactions provided by commercial companies.

The onus is on public sector agencies to deliver and RPA technology can help them do so, at speed. If it’s not part of the tech stack in your organisation, chances are you’ll struggle to engage those customers who stopped standing in queues long ago.