As part of the public action modernization program and led by the DITP (Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation), the “Public Service +” platform offers a variety of solutions aimed at improving citizens ’experience into services. public.[1]. This system is based on 3 main components.
Experience sharing: On the platform, users are invited to share their experience about their use of a particular public service (health insurance, police service, etc.). Whether positive or negative, the collection system encourages users to make a detailed (but anonymous) report on their experience, enabling them to identify irritants to eliminate or good practices to spread. in a more widespread way. All of these experiences can be consulted from the platform (there have been over 15,000 reviews submitted since its inception) with filters by the service concerned. About 75% of these experiences are the subject of a response, which can also be consulted, if only to indicate which channel the problem reported can be addressed or to thank users for a positive testimonial. This feedback encouraged the work of the DITP’s ongoing improvement groups.
Simplifying administrative documents:
Thanks to this service, any form that a user considers too complicated to fill out can be placed on the platform so that the opportunity for simplification can be learned. The platform presents some examples of improved presentation of information, simplifying the administrative language to demonstrate the usefulness of this user feedback. But unlike experience sharing, it’s not possible to access user feedback history, or track the number of simplified documents per domain or per year.
Monitoring service quality in administrations:
This is one of the most original components compared to the usual practices in terms of customer relations in the entrepreneurial sector. In this section, about fifteen ministries or state agencies (e.g. employment center, health insurance) provide indicators of their performance. These indicators are at the national level and for some, geographically. Thus we can know the average waiting time to access a CNAM advisor or the rate of handling e-mails less than a week from the General Directorate of Finance. While few companies are talking about what has actually happened in their customer relations, this effort for transparency on the part of State services is worth noting.
[1] See https://www.plus.transformation.gouv.fr/; [2] Digital Barometer – 2021 Edition – Crédoc
Vincent Placer (Colorado)
The French State has been successfully digitizing public services for many years now (e.g. impots.gouv.fr). The attention given to the civic experience is generally more recent but, here too, public services are not content to imitate recipes imported from the commercial sector. The Public Service + initiative is interesting because it offers a complete system for monitoring the voice of users that combines a collection of experiences, collaborative actions and performance monitoring. Even if this service is relatively new and still suffers from a lack of popularity (the number of experience sharing remains low compared to the number of daily interactions with French people in the administration), it will contribute to making the continuous improvement of public services even greater. participation and concrete. It will be interesting if feedback or simplification of documents is considered from time to time to measure its effectiveness. Performance monitoring by administration is a critical part. This component deserves to be more harmonious between services and provide a more frequent update of the data. However, even companies that are more advanced in their approach to the customer experience are reluctant to talk about the real consequences in terms of accessibility, complaint handling time, and so on. However, we need to remain vigilant because the entirety of this system can only be accessed online. In fact, nearly a quarter of the population does not consider themselves to have sufficient competence to perform certain administrative procedures online, as highlighted by Crédoc’s latest report on digital use. The quality of the civic experience cannot be reduced to the digitization of public services, even if it has contributed significantly to it.