The Ministry of Regional Municipalities and Water Resources in Oman offers a case in point. In 2008, the agency created Injaz Hall, which standardized application processes (for car licenses and building permits, for example) across 44 municipalities in nine governorates. This initiative went beyond creating the front-facing one-stop shop—it included more fundamental organizational and process changes, including an integrated IT system.

The organization has set up a virtual college, which offers accredited learning and technical training focused on developing competencies in areas like customer-service and call-center skills. Consequently, Centrelink wins consistent acclaim for its customer satisfaction—91 percent of customers agree that staff treated them with respect and 82 percent felt that staff had told them everything they had to know to get the service they needed.

In-person and telephone channels still account for the majority of citizen interactions with their government. Staff who can provide clear, consistent, and courteous explanations and services are therefore critical to citizen satisfaction. Recognizing this, the Australian government’s Centrelink program, which delivers a range of government payments and services, provides its customer-service employees with a variety of support, tools, and development opportunities.

The service has evolved greatly since then and now offers a more automated, multiplatform channel, including text messaging, apps, and social media. In fact, the online site, which launched in 2009, had nearly seven million visitors by 2013; between 2011 and 2013 the platform had supported more than 300,000 interactive text sessions.12 These automated, dynamic channels ensure citizens are served efficiently and also achieve consistently high satisfaction scores.

Citizens are increasingly expecting multichannel communication options and show a strong and growing preference for self-serve channels, such as online portals. Although government agencies have made advances in expanding the availability of self-serve online channels, uptake is often low, and few people find they can complete their journey online. Satisfaction drops significantly when citizens are unable to use their channel of choice and are forced to switch channels.

Mapping the citizen journey using the three guidelines we’ve discussed will help transformation leaders identify and prioritize pain points and examine their root causes. One government agency that processes grants, for example, used a citizen journey approach to very precisely scope the IT infrastructure needed to support its grant applicants.

To develop actionable insights, government leaders can link citizen journeys to the internal organizational processes that affect them. Therefore, an important part of effective journey mapping is defining the key operational activities and systems involved at each stage.

A large government agency in Asia used a simple approach to identify which journeys mattered most to its citizens: the department listed all the services it provided and then categorized them into specific journeys, such as “simple queries,” “applications,” and “appeals.” The agency ultimately identified more than 60 different citizen journeys across 20 services, eight population segments, and ten channels, and then combined customer-complaint data with interviews of frontline employees and senior leaders.

To avoid spreading resources too thin, government leaders can focus improvement initiatives on what matters most to citizens. Identifying the most pressing journeys can be done in a number of ways, including segmenting customers by need (it’s not uncommon for a small group of constituents to lodge the majority of the complaints) and identifying areas with the highest overall levels of dissatisfaction.

As you progress toward a full-service multichannel approach, you can incorporate the principles of continuous improvement into your processes. Precisely offers constituent insights so you can learn which services and capabilities your citizens value the most. With a proper view of citizen data and the right analytics tools, government organizations can uncover patterns, visualize insights in real time, and make sound decisions that drive value for their constituents.