Image by Habitat_de_lill via Pixabay

Public service experts from four countries joined a Global Government Forum webinar to discuss how to make public services more responsive to the needs of citizens – including work to match the experience offered by the private sector, and how to foster trust and digital inclusion

Governments around the world have rarely faced as much pressure as they do now. Already this decade, governments have faced a once-in-a-century pandemic, high inflation, budgetary pressures, volatility caused by global conflicts, and increasing workplace pressures.  

Amid these pressures, how can governments ensure services work effectively? 

At a Global Government Forum webinar, supported by knowledge partner Qualtrics, public and private sector experts from Canada, Singapore, Austria and the UN=nited States discussed how governments can best measure the effectiveness of public services, and how they can use insights from service users to better align services with their needs. 

Hefen Wong, director of work pass systems and experience at Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, kicked off the webinar by explaining how the Singapore government is modernising its legacy systems while creating new user-centred digital services.

She said the Singapore government designs digital services with clarity, transparency, and certainty in mind.

“If you think about work visas [or applications for] government services, they are usually very opaque and usually you don’t really know why something is approved or rejected. We provide either an approval, a rejection, or an interim update and communicate in a way that’s clear, helpful, human, and firm when we need to be,” she explained.

To measure the citizen experience of government, Singapore thinks of digital services as individual products, and closely monitoring customer ratings and qualitative feedback to better understand what works and what doesn’t.

While the Ministry of Manpower is not phasing out analogue transactions, it works to make it quicker to access services digitally to incentivise people to move to digital.

Wong also stressed the importance of maintaining citizen trust when introducing new technologies. “Trust is a very important currency for us, so we are quite careful and have not used public facing GenAI tools on a large scale yet, but we are making small steps.”

Read more: World’s most senior civil servants share key challenges and opportunities at the Global Government Summit

Maintaining trust

Honey Dacanay, director general of digital policy and performance at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, agreed that fostering trust is a priority when modernising digital policy.

“We want to make digital much easier and be awarded the same degree of trust that was hard earned in the other channels.”

She added that she doesn’t see non-digital channels disappearing, but instead every channel evolving to be more complementary rather than competing with each other.

Dacanay’s work aims to simplify and modernise digital policy to create better programmes and services that ultimately provide a better citizen experience. She explained that the Treasury Board’s current approach is to centre around service outcomes, rather than solely focusing on the number of outputs or transactions.

“It’s very easy for a policy to essentially be a meaningless set of words [but] we want those words to have meaning. We want [the policies] to be fit for purpose. We want them to create the enabling conditions for good delivery.”

Her team have been taking the time to measure and drive down the “learning costs” for citizens when using digital government services. This includes how long it takes to figure out how an individual government programme works, or if they’re eligible for a benefit, and what documents they need to complete a form. They are also working to reduce the compliance and psychological costs for citizens, such as having to take a day off work to queue for a service, or the stress or stigma that can come with making certain applications.

Through monitoring the types of calls employees receive in the call centre, they record the reasons why citizens are struggling to use a service or getting frustrated by the process, which often stems from having to re-enter documents or repeat steps.

Read more: G7 AI challenge launches to transform public services

The importance of analogue

Martin Böhm, e-Government advisor at the Austrian Federal Chancellery, is also focused on streamlining service delivery.

The Federal Chancellery has implemented the ‘once only’ principle into its e-government framework. This means that citizens only need to upload their information once and public authorities can then reuse this data for future forms and transactions where appropriate, much like the approach of many companies in the private sector.

Like the webinar’s other panellists, Böhm believes that as digital services improve, analogue methods should remain an option for citizens so that e-government services remain accessible to people of all ages and abilities.

He aims to make e-government services consistent across all channels, so that whether citizens or business owners call, go to a service counter in person, use the government website or use its app, the quality of the experience is the same.

While allowing customers to select the channel best suited to them, Austria offers opportunities for people to improve their digital skills, including a digital ID tour where a team travels around the country to help users set up their accounts. It also provides workshops and online courses to teach people skills such as how to use e-ID and biometric sensors on their mobile phone.

Austria’s e-government takes a mobile-first approach and many of its digital services are designed to be used on a mobile phone because the government recognises that most citizens want to access digital services in this way.

“Our main goal is to create a ‘smart government’, where citizens and businesses can communicate and interact with public authorities in a convenient, simple, and mobile way, while still having the possibility to do it in an analogue form as well,” Böhm said.

Read more: How to identify skills gaps in government – and close them

Closing the gap

Amanda Chavez, vice president of federal strategy at Qualtrics, also emphasised the importance of utilising digital services to improve rather than hamper the citizen experience of government and make government more responsive.

The citizen experience of government is not just about the speed of an interaction but whether a solution is reached, she said. Chavez is currently working with an agency that is changing its metric of success, shifting from a three to five minute resolution target for calls to its call centre to  a “first contact resolution” objective. This could take longer but ensures people receive what they need rather than being passed on to different employees.

“Making sure that a solution is bespoke and that you take the time necessary to solve it reduces uncertainty for people, while simultaneously increasing trust,” Chavez said.

Qualtrics is also working to close the gap between the speed and ease of service delivery offered by the private sector and the public sector. Chavez explained that citizens now expect the same immediacy from government as they experience when dealing with private sector companies.

However, she acknowledged that governments face unique challenges that make it difficult to streamline service delivery, and that with bureaucracy comes complexity.

“We’re trying to use AI and data to remove that complexity and reduce the heavy administrative burden that rests on citizens shoulders at the moment,” she said.

The ‘How to measure – and improve – the citizen experience of government’ webinar was held by Global Government Forum in partnership with knowledge partner Qualtrics on 4 December 2025.

Watch the webinar in full here to hear the panellists discuss:

How to ascertain what good citizen experience looks like
How to bring government departments together to provide more joined-up services
How to get the data you need to measure success, and consideration of both quantitative and qualitative data
How to design and implement frameworks for service delivery auditing
Whether AI is helping or hindering the improvement and measurement of citizen satisfaction, and the importance of human interaction
The skills that civil servants need to provide citizens with the level of service they expect, both now and in the future
More about the ‘once only’ principle
More about how to balance customer service speed with quality of the resolution



Source link