Digital Services – Caught between two worlds

Opinion by Radu Puchiu, Co-founder, H.appyCities

Every time I am asked to write about digital transformation in Romania, I feel like I am trapped between two worlds: one that is moving fast, redesigning processes in an agile manner, rethinking businesses for a new digital world, and one that is look trapped in the past, bureaucratic, with a complicated interaction with its customers, rarely digital.

It is even harder to write in a space like this professional one provided by The Diplomat because on one hand I might end preaching the obvious for many of the readers and speaking a strange, unknown language for the ones who I believe really need to digitally transform their work.

So, trying to give some food for thought to both of these worlds I was looking at a common ground – the experience of the customer. After all it should matter the most for both companies and public sector, for example.

Looking from this customer experience perspective I saw three approaches that are generally used:

1. Digital for better services – sounds generic but there is a lot of effort behind, from knowing you customer, gather data, understanding the needs, finding the best offline-online mix to provide the best experience. It is one of the most used approaches and involves gradual changes, easier to be accepted and endorsed by the internal organisation, easier to measure and further improve. For many companies is business as usual but finding the right online-offline balance is a continuous challenge.
2. Digital first – not only looking at the customer experience but at the whole process behind the service provided, rethinking it for a digital experience in the first place. It involves a more profound transformation across the organisation and an important effort behind, both in terms of leadership and technical requirements.
3. Digital only – years ago sound rather like a fancy idea, “nice to have” in some cases, “only in an emergency” situation in others. But the pandemic brought many of the companies and government services this reality. The need to reimagine, rethink and redesign services for a non in person interaction became a reality for some. But it also became a working scenario for many others – what if we cannot interact physically with our customers? What if we are in a situation that all the processes need to be completely digital?

Living in an era of connections, idea exchange and collaboration I would like to rather open a conversation than give advice. So, I am openly asking, how is your organisation doing? What approach do you use to digitally transform the customer experience, the services you provide or important part of your organisation processes?

But, more important than all, how could we transfer the lessons we learn to the public administration? How can we help building better public services?

Looking forward to learning from your comments on social media.