CIO opinion
Chatbots improve government
service delivery
As our government looks
towards new technologies
to enhance services to South
Africa’s 55 million citizens and
residents, Saurabh Kumar,
CEO at In212 Technologies,
says Chatbots appear as
a valuable tool, with the
potential to transform the
way people engage with
government departments.
via chatbot platforms. The applications range
from the most basic types of engagement
(like checking the balance on your housing
rates account, renewing your vehicle licence,
or reporting faults in electrical infrastructure),
to more complex interactions, like residency
applications or small business registrations.
As a feedback and engagement channel,
chatbots could also give governments a far
richer perspective of their constituents’ needs
and priorities, helping governments and their
departments to better respond to the hottest
issues that frustrate individuals.
Advantages
Saurabh Kumar, CEO at In212 Technologies
C
hatbots combine the ease of mobile
messaging with the power of artificial
intelligence (AI), presenting users with
new ways of engaging with an organisation
(to find or request information, execute
transactions, update personal profiles, place
requests or bookings).
For chatbot creators, the aim is to create
experiences where users ‘feel’ like they’re
speaking to a highly knowledgeable human
being, but are in fact interacting with a
sophisticated bot, and one that’s continually
learning and optimising itself, based on its
interactions with users.
In South Africa, with our high density of
smartphones, there’s a massive untapped
opportunity for local and national
government to start providing certain services
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INTELLIGENTCIO
So, just what is the core challenge that
chatbots seek to resolve? In many cases, our
traditional modes of engagement between
citizen and government are tedious and
time-consuming (such as waiting on hold
for call centre staff to become available
or standing for hours in queues). These
experiences become especially jarring as we
enter the era of ‘instant digital gratification’,
where we’re accustomed to immediate
responses from most other organisations.
By digitising and exposing basic services on
mobile apps or web portals, governments
can improve workflows and support ticketing,
as they hand-off the most mundane and
repetitive tasks to digital ‘bots’. This helps to
free up staff to focus on higher-value work,
more complex queries and problem-solving,
or more strategic issues.
Chatbots have the advantage of being
limitlessly scalable (theoretically, there’s
no additional cost to serving 1,000 people,
versus one person). When created and
refined correctly, bots automatically ‘learn’
from their interactions and from the organic
involvement of human actors in the process.
For example, if a bot is unable to understand
a customer query and a human supervisor
is required to intervene, the bot will learn
from the answer that the supervisor gave
to the user. By requiring that users create
digital profiles, government departments can
start tracking a detailed history of the user’s
interactions (with both the digital and the
human workforce), building a clear picture
of the user and helping to personalise the
responses from the chatbot. In fact, this
digital profile should be synched with various
other back-end systems as well as related
government departments, such as CRM
databases, or the Home Affairs and the
Licensing Department databases.
Getting started
The next step is to move from concepts
on paper, into real life scenarios. Based on
our work with government departments
around the world, we can look at five key
considerations when getting started on your
chatbot journey:
1. Identify the public services that
would benefit from chatbots, or from
increased feedback from citizens and
focus on creating chatbot interfaces for
those services
2. Ensure that your chatbot is fully-
integrated into back-end, legacy and
core systems that will enable to bot
to easily fetch information, write or
reduplicate new data into databases and
add activities into workflow systems
3. Thoroughly address the cybersecurity
requirements from all possible angles.
As more and more sensitive data
bouncing between bots and users is
stored digitally, it’s essential to have an
impenetrable security posture
4. Implement a comprehensive, engaging
change management approach. As with
any new technology, it takes a lot to
overcome initial resistance. Ensure you
have a sustained focus on the benefits
to the staff member, the government
department and the end-user,
brought to bear by compelling change
management strategies
5. Get started – today! Chatbots are still a
somewhat nascent technology, so it can
be tempting to sit on the sidelines and
watch the field developing. But the best
approach is to simply get started with a
very basic chatbot, in a restricted beta
trial and then build it out from there,
infusing ever more complex self-learning
algorithms as you progress. n
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