Solace blog

As a government agency, you know it’s vital to collect citizen feedback on the services you deliver. Just as importantly,  you know it is important to “close the loop” with citizens, residents, and visitors after they give you feedback. That essential feedback and insight from your constituents is known as Experience data.

This approach becomes even more powerful when you combine Experience data (‘X’) with Operational data (‘O’) that you already hold within your organisation, thus ‘tying the knot’. SAP describe this as Data Driven Government. The combination of X- and O-data can help your organization know the “what” and the “why” and can help you take action to close the loop and achieve better outcomes.

The challenge is trying to do this by combining multiple sources of “operational” data, “big data”, or seeking sentiment across key known issues. This is like working in black and white. You don’t have the ‘colour’ you need to see things differently.

X-DATA (WHO, WHY)

| noun | 1: Experience data, the human factor data — the beliefs, the emotions/feelings, and  sentiments.

O-DATA (WHAT, HOW)

| noun | 1: Operational data — customer, finance, HR, procurement, services  data, tangible records of actual activities.

EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

| noun | 1: the act of developing a holistic understanding of human experiences through combined x-data and o-data-driven intelligence, thereby driving a real-time impact on operations; a virtuous cycle of learning and continuous feedback. Success requires the fusion of human experience data with operational data to identify and create new approaches – the new North Star.

The constant and fluid fusing of X and O data provides a holistic understanding – the “colour”. You can more quickly, or even preemptively, understand and adjust strategies to drive immediate impact. This virtuous cycle of listening, understanding and taking action provides an avenue to see things differently and close the experience gap thereby improving performance.

Yes – business performance is the outcome, however fundamentally your customers are happier! Your citizens and residents actually feel listened to.

For local government, customer experience is only the jumping off point in the move towards greater customer and employee engagement.  Closing the experience gap creates additional opportunities to an improved and harmonised digital service delivery paradigm that boosts citizen satisfaction scores while increasing trust and generating savings for the public purse.

Government can deliver more effective services to citizens by adopting a data-driven strategy that enables real-time insight and analytics to drive greater public trust and engagement

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X-DATA CAN HELP YOU UNDERSTAND…

• The issues that are causing citizens the most problems
• The level of trust that citizens have in government
• The impact of new policies on citizens
• Citizens’ satisfaction from the service they are receiving
• Citizen and public opinion on various programmes and policies

X+O DRIVES OUTCOMES…

• Reduced complexity by enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes
• Increased public confidence by determining why problems are happening to citizens and identifying options to solve the root-cause issues
• Minimized risk and increased ability to achieve strategic goals with real-time, citizen and employee insights
• Increased ability to draw data-driven insights in order to design more effective programmes, ease the burden of paying taxes, reduce improper payments, and optimise processes

At SAP we are excited about the possibilities this provides to public service organisations to enable them to make progress in creating a data-driven culture that is open and transparent, one that values evidence over intuition, and one that integrates interorganisational, experiential and operational data that already exists to deliver targeted interventions and achieve better outcomes.

We look forward to discussing this further at the 2019 Solace Summit this month – visit SAP at Stand 11.

Jim White

Head of Public Services, EMEA North, SAP