Why public sector organizations should harness AI to achieve customer satisfaction levels like the private sector

Thamer Alharbi

?The customer of 2022 looks very different to the customer we served just a few years ago. Customer expectations have changed. And this change demands that businesses totally transform how they deliver products and services. And change they have. In a matter of months, we’ve seen the public and private sector execute digital transformation strategies that would otherwise have taken years to roll out.

As we start a new year, now is the perfect time to build on this momentum; keeping, and improving on, the pandemic-era ways of life that are now the new norm and that have become incredibly popular with consumers. ?

Addressing the citizen of the future

According to McKinsey & Co, customer experience (CX) has become a key performance metric — with CX savvy businesses outperforming their less customer focused competitors by over 200%. Across the globe, we have seen some government agencies acknowledge the importance of providing a good experience to citizens – their customers – and embrace private sector technologies for the public good. But these are the exception. In fact, a 2019 McKinsey & Co report found that most governments underperform when it comes to customer experience.

The time is ripe for a system overhaul. But it needn’t be an entire overhaul and the public sector needn’t build everything from scratch. Public sector organizations must take time to understand what they have, optimise their existing technologies and assess any gaps that might exist on their path towards delivering innovative government services.

Microsoft’s work with various partners to assist with the COVID-19 vaccination process serves as a great example of the efficiencies that can be achieved when you use the right technologies and when you have the right public-private partnerships in place.?Microsoft played a key role in deploying technology platforms across the globe to enable the data management, registration and scheduling of COVID-19 vaccinations. Imagine this kind of efficiency applied to other government services, like renewing a car license, applying for an identity document or paying a municipal account.?

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AI as a public sector enabler

According to a global survey by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), artificial intelligence (AI) will be one of the most important technologies of 2022. So much so that 95% of the survey respondents agreed that AI will drive most of the innovation across nearly every industry sector in the next one to five years. Including government.

While use and uptake in public service agencies varies depending on maturity level and the type of public services offered, AI is already being deployed and scaled to do everything from identifying suspicious activities to monitoring and improving personnel and equipment.

Take for example our Ministry of Justice. I have mentioned before how this department has used Azure to digitise its judicial and documentary services, among them, property archiving and transfers, and the safeguarding of real estate wealth. Today, thanks to one of the region’s largest hybrid deployments of Azure Stack Hub, a property transfer can be completed online in under an hour, while comprehensive document digitization is helping better safeguard real estate wealth. Our citizens have appreciated the benefits of this digital service – to date, over 60,000 property transactions have been completed using the new platform.

Public sector organizations can use AI to boost the quality of delivery of public services, improve communication and engagement with citizens, create better policies and make smarter decisions. But delivering this does require a balancing act. Successful Public sector organizations will have to find the right mix of tools and technologies to deliver real efficiency and to improve public services, responsibly.