In recent years, digital transformation and its growing adoption have had an extreme impact on the public and government sectors. To churn out increased government productivity, many of the public sector agencies across the entire world are leveraging technology that eliminates many of the manual and redundant tasks operated by employees. The government sector faces a variety of challenges, including an ever-changing economy, budgetary pressures, recurrent administration changes, and fluctuating public expectations.
RPA (robotics process automation) plays a key role in making the transition rather quick and easy for business processes through the integration of systems. Currently, many organizations and businesses focus on customer satisfaction and look to RPAs as a stimulant for fresh, innovative thinking and creative business strategies. As enterprises worldwide struggle with highly competitive and unpredictable business environments and rapidly evolving operating models, such as the need to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, intelligent automation - the integration of RPA with AI - is enabling new levels of agility. Using automation intelligently can enable governments to deliver exceptional customer service, utilising innovations that are as sensitive to people as they are to technology.
However, there are some drawbacks for government sectors to make this switch from older systems to contemporary innovation. For example, the cons include budget constraints, transactional bottlenecks, overburdened employees, and the ever-evolving compliance requirements of the citizens and law. Governments may also be resistant due to the lack of agile interactions with citizen services, a growing backlog of work with limited capacity to tackle the issues, shifting workforce demographics, and the consistent change of policy changes that must frequently be updated and integrated into business practices. But all these drawbacks happen regularly, regardless of technology implementation. Integrated software services aid fluidity for these government activities. Additionally, shifting employee priorities off mundane manual tasks frees up more time for them to focus on high-value work, such as citizen-related processes. For example, federal and state works now dedicate many of their working hours to consolidating data, while with automation, those tasks can be done much quicker and with just as much accuracy, if not more, since that avoids the potential for human error.
Introducing robotic process automation into the government and public sector is a step toward digital transformation, which will lead to greater efficiency, lower costs, and better interaction with citizens. Here are a few examples of the ease provided by automation in the different fields of government processes:
Citizens expect that their data is encrypted from public access, as well as easily accessible to them when the time comes that they need to switch doctors' offices, move states, or even need assistance with taxes. It is imperative for governments to maintain resilience in the face of growing complexity in citizens' needs, as well as an aging population that impacts health and social services.
For example, The Australian Tax Office (ATO) offers a remarkable example of how automation drives reliability and simplicity to build the overall customer satisfaction rate. Before the process of automation was introduced, tax forms were manual and tedious, leaving plenty of room for error and fraud. Their complexity forced citizens to work with a tax agent, which costs them significantly more than an online website where their information was immediately updated from integrated platforms. The data provided by the ATO prefills individuals’ tax return forms based on digital filing, avoiding the trek citizens had to make to locate their history and current job, insurance, and property details. The ATO sent out a qualitative survey to the citizens that used this platform for their tax returns, and they received the strongest approval rate for customer ease and satisfaction compared to any other Australian federal government service for the public. Tax returns that used to take many days to complete entirely now can take minutes, saving both the ATO employees and the citizens significant time.
From input through to compliance and reporting, RPA enables smoother, faster, service delivery, by automating high friction and bottleneck steps in processes. Input to reporting, RPA automates high-friction, time-consuming steps in processes to enable smoother, faster service delivery. Customer journeys consist of a series of steps to accomplish a task, including the channels and touchpoints users interact with, as well as their needs and questions throughout.
Optimise data collection with consolidation and RPA to process all the right information in the correct way in a timely fashion. Automation can reduce reliance on external resources by handling complex government processes efficiently and securely.
