Improving the user experience of citizens and businesses through an integrated case and benefits overview

When communicating with the public sector regarding cases, benefits, and deadlines, citizens and businesses have a need for receiving a confirmation - in order to provide a sense of security and alignment of expectations.

This can be met by offering users a coherent overview of their cases and benefits across the public sector. This is the conclusion reached in a report prepared by Deloitte Digital for central government, municipalities, and regions in Denmark.

Initiative 1.3 in the common public sector Digital Strategy 2016-2020 aims at improving the ability of citizens and businesses to get an overview of relevant data held by public authorities in selected areas.

Findings

Deloitte Digital has identified which needs citizens and businesses have for a case and benefits overview when interacting with the public sector.

• Sense of security: An overview of cases can, for example, give citizens and businesses a sense of security that what they are doing is correct and clarify who is responsible for the matter, whether it is the citizen/business or the public authority that needs to do something to move the matter forward.
• Confirmation: An overview should, for example, contribute to ensuring that citizens and businesses obtain confirmation that the public authority has received, what has been sent, and that it has reached the right person.
• Alignment of expectations: An overview of benefits or grants should help the user gain an insight and an overview of future and past payments. Today, public authorities are often asked questions about when a transfer will happen, which amount will be transferred, when people can expect to hear something on the matter, and how far down the process it is.
• Changes in benefit payments: This is aimed at meeting the needs of citizens to understand clearly why a benefit payment amount has changed.
• Deadlines: The deadline or obligation overview is designed to meet the need of businesses to know more about deadlines/obligations that apply to their business. The overview primarily covers the need of small businesses to keep track of many different types of deadline set by several authorities. Today, users find themselves forgetting, for example, the reporting periods that apply to certain areas. The overview could help draw the user’s attention to when something needs to be reported in a longer time scale and thus the opportunity to plan their business activities better.

Based on these identified needs, specific concepts have been drawn up for how an overview might look in selected situations.

Next steps

The working group will continue to work on incorporating the report’s recommendations and arguments in specific pilot projects in 2017 and 2018, in which relevant authorities will participate. These projects will focus on, among other things, the legal framework for the overview, data and system analyses as well as developing a mock-up of the concepts for the overview. The goal is to move even closer to achieving a proper design solution in 2018.

Read the report and see examples of the overview (in Danish only).