Top 4 benefits of ServiceNow for citizen-facing services

The pressure is on to deliver the efficient digital services your citizens expect. Here’s how ServiceNow can help you hit the mark and elevate the experience for both your internal and external users.

As the world races to digitally transform and deliver slick new service experiences, not every sector has been able to keep up.

Public sector organisations, in particular, have to navigate a bureaucratic sea of technology, security and compliance challenges as part of any transformation initiative.

This means that whilst the streamlined apps of the private sector have raised citizen expectations – the experience presented by government services continues to fall short.

BUT, there is hope to be had. ServiceNow’s powerful platform of interconnected services and operations data offers an excellent opportunity for public organisations to consolidate their IT management and deliver coordinated, fully joined-up services to citizens.

In this blog, we’ll explore the key reasons why ServiceNow is the ideal solution to help you provide efficient, accessible and convenient services to citizens.

Why is ServiceNow a good fit for the public sector?

Patience is in short supply in our fast-paced digital age. When we use services we want them to work, be easy to use, and help us get what we need quickly.

This is especially important for services provided by the government or other public sector agencies that citizens rely on to receive benefits, pay taxes, apply for passports, and more.

ServiceNow already has a strong presence in the public sector for providing IT services to internal users (our work with the DVSA and other agencies has helped see to that) but – thanks to the development of a new GDS Toolkit – the opportunity to use it for citizen-facing services has now arisen.

That means you can incorporate more of your IT management into a single platform – unlocking powerful interconnected data streams and workflows to dramatically improve how you deliver services and support citizens.

ServiceNow even has a dedicated Public Sector Digital Services suite that includes pre-prepared data models, portals and playbooks to help you accelerate the modernisation of your services.

Benefits of ServiceNow for public-facing services

Let’s dig into the key benefits of using ServiceNow for citizen-facing services.

1. Offer easy-to-use, consumer-grade experiences to citizens

Citizens have high expectations when it comes to online experiences. They want to interact, engage, and transact with government services exactly as they would with any modern consumer brand – anytime, anywhere and on any device.

They want real-time access to information, immediate responses to questions, and proactive communications that keep them updated with things they need to know or prepare for in the future.

With ServiceNow, you can deliver on these expectations. A key part of this is the Government Services Portal, offering a single place for citizens to find and interact with your services. This helps streamline the process and offers transparency on the status of any open cases or tickets.

By running your services on the Now Platform, you can take advantage of many other features expected of modern services, such as single sign-on to applications, a responsive mobile experience and intelligent AI chatbots, like Virtual Agent.

That way, you can provide around-the-clock self-service support without paying for additional personnel – and citizens can find and access what they need however they choose.

2. Efficiently deliver essential services and information

Delivering effective services goes far beyond the front end. The Government Services Portal may improve the user experience, but it’s the interconnected and joined-up nature of your data and infrastructure that will make truly efficient services possible.

By consolidating everything into a single platform, you can break down siloed departments, tidy up your data and start to make smart use of it.

This allows you to quickly digitise services and connect that front-end experience to powerful behind-the-scenes workflows and automation.

Say, for example, someone’s applying for a passport and you need to verify their identity, the workflow will automatically route the task to the appropriate department and return it back into the workflow once verification has been completed.

Using ServiceNow, that all happens automatically and the case information travels with it – keeping both your agents and the citizen concerned up to date.

Even better, ServiceNow’s Public Sector Digital Services playbooks come with pre-configured services and workflows to get you up and running in next to no time.

3. Become proactive vs. reactive

The best service providers keep one step ahead of any potential downtime or failure – updating users on the status of services and advising of any future disruption.

But it’s extremely difficult to reach this stage without visibility over your data and devices. Many public sector organisations struggle to make sense of what they’ve got where and how it’s performing amidst the murky mess of legacy IT infrastructure and siloed systems.

ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) product is designed to help solve that problem. Building on the data consolidation of the previous point, ITOM will help you discover and monitor your devices and infrastructure – giving you intelligent data you can act on.

With that in place, you can then use features like Event Management to detect – and even remedy – issues before they have an impact on services.

To take this a step further, you can use the Now Platform’s AI to ‘self-heal’ incidents with automated fixes. This can range from automatic server switching to dispatching a technician to an affected site armed with all the information they need for a speedy resolution.

This presents a massive shift from the days of break-fix firefighting, freeing you up to focus on bigger, more impactful service improvements and changes – and proactively notifying citizens of any issues to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

4. Meet GDS accessibility standards with ease

What’s that I hear you say? “But ServiceNow isn’t GDS accessibility compliant”?

Well, we have some news for you – it is now thanks to our ServiceNow GDS Toolkit.

Historically, it’s true that ServiceNow hasn’t been a perfect fit for citizen-facing services because of the need to meet the GDS Service Standard for accessibility.

This has been an annoying hurdle for our public sector clients for a while now, but no longer. Our GDS Toolkit allows you to create, or recreate, ServiceNow-powered services in a GDS-aligned portal – drawing from the GOV.UK Design System library of GDS-approved modules, typefaces, colours and more.

That means you’re free to reap all the benefits of ServiceNow, and the great functionality it can provide to both internal and external users, all whilst meeting the GDS standard for accessibility.

Given the legal – and moral – responsibility of public sector departments and agencies to ensure everyone can access and use their services, the ability to offer effective services that also support web accessibility tools such as screen readers and keyboard controls is a huge win, for everyone.

Conclusion

ServiceNow has long set the standard for stellar IT services, but in the public sector, those benefits have had to remain largely internal.

With the GDS Toolkit helping you meet the Service Standard for accessibility, you can now extend those benefits to your citizens – using ServiceNow to transform and modernise the way you deliver services.

For more on ServiceNow for the public sector, or to see our GDS Toolkit in action, simply reach out to us for a friendly chat and we’ll help you meet citizen expectations with ease.

Key takeaways

• Public sector services are lagging behind the polished digital experiences of the private sector.
• ServiceNow is an ideal fit to help deliver the service experience citizens expect, providing a unified, mobile-friendly, omnichannel experience and intelligent self-service options.
• Incorporating your IT infrastructure into a single platform helps break down barriers between siloed data and departments – helping you make data-driven improvements at scale.
• Having visibility and control over the devices and data in your organisation is crucial to adopting a proactive approach to service delivery, even solving problems before they impact citizens.
• A new GDS Toolkit from FlyForm means that you can use ServiceNow for citizen-facing services AND meet the accessibility requirements set out by the Government Digital Service.