What can public servants learn from start-ups about user-centricity?

This article is written by Ng Kaijie, strategy director at Carousell, a Southeast Asian recommerce start-up, on secondment from the Government of Singapore. A version was first published on Medium. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

Governments find themselves excited about start-ups, and not without reason. The most successful ones find innovative ways to understand and serve their users, often through the use of technology. As a public servant seconded to a start-up, I’m often asked what governments can learn from them about user-centricity and how a focus on users could help govern better.

Do governments have users?

When we think of public services, many picture grey, concrete walls, hard chairs and long queues. Contrast that with start-ups, which aim to delight their users and religiously monitor data to see whether they’ve succeeded.

Start-ups have to understand their users to create and deliver value, faster and more effectively than competitors. There is limited value in coming in second. This is because many start-ups rely on network effects to scale. The company with the most users creates most value for the collective. In doing so, they draw in even more users, and the winner in this competition takes all the users.

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Contrast that with governments, which have a monopoly on public services. It is impossible for the people of Kazakhstan to renounce their citizenships and emigrate to the US if they are unhappy about public utilities.

Governments thus face fewer existential questions than start-ups. Companies are judged daily on their growth and financial metrics, whether investors choose to buy shares or not. In contrast, politicians are judged every few years at the ballot box, and public servants and branches of government are judged indirectly for the most part.

But the responsibilities of governments extend beyond the current generation of citizens. Policy-makers use language like “efficiency”, “financial sustainability” and “transformation” — future-oriented terms that also guide their thinking.

So if governments have users, they are always present, and future, users. This can cause conflict as policy-makers’ long-term objectives can go against democratic principles. This is especially true if voters expect and demand near-term policies to immediately improve their lives, trading off better outcomes in the future. Governments that focus inordinately on the future, and compromise the present, can give citizens a sense that they are elitist and know best.

Governments have come under strong criticism recently. We hear slogans like “drain the swamp”, referring to the US federal government; former adviser to the UK Prime Minister Dominic Cummings promised ”hard rain” against his country’s civil service. These speak to citizens who no longer believe their governments are looking out for them.

As a monopoly, governments aren’t accountable to their users in the same way that start-ups are. However, they increasingly need to balance their longer-term priorities with satisfying citizens in the present. So what can they learn from start-ups, which seek to delight their users every day?

Earn the trust of your users in the present

Trust is critical to governance. It gives public servants and political leaders the space to think long term.

Start-ups earn users’ trust by creating value for them, even if it does not directly benefit the start-up monetarily. Think of ride-hailing and food delivery apps that let users track their service in real time. The value being offered is convenience: showing customers where their car or food is enables them to plan their time accordingly. This may not translate directly to revenues, and in fact is a cost on business: they have to spend a lot on building the feature to give the user this convenient information. But this builds trust through transparency about when the service will be delivered.

Governments can build the same trust with its present users, simply by delivering services better. In last year’s Budget, the Singapore Government gave cash support to citizens through PayNow (the national funds transfer service), credited directly to their bank accounts. The amount of cash the government offered didn’t need to grow. But it was delivered better. Cheques don’t need to be sent by post, which causes uncertainty and saves citizens the hassle of going to encash the cheque.

Governments may be accused of not being responsive to their users, despite knowing a lot about their citizens. But they also have deep experience of delivering public services, and have a mandate from citizens to serve.

If governments obsessed over users in the present, like start-ups, they’d focus not just on what, but also how services are delivered. We already have Service Level Agreements governing how quickly public servants should reply to requests or feedback from the public. We also use follow-up surveys to measure customer satisfaction.

Can we go one step further by indicating which stage a request or a piece of feedback currently is at? Start-ups find that when developers respond to app reviews, it can improve the rating of the app by an average of 20%. Users change their review scores after seeing that their feedback has been valued.

So in government, can we keep our users updated every step of the way, on matters that most concern them? We may not always be able to solve the issue at hand, but a more empathetic, responsive system can make them feel better in the present.

Work with users to fix the things that frustrate them

This brings me to my last point, on the value of being user-centric. It not only builds trust, but also helps us build a better product. Why? Because focusing on users means we can better understand the things that frustrate them, and solve them better through the things we design.

The same is true in governance. Trust is essential if we want to balance the near and long-term interests of citizens. In addition, when governments win trust and focus on their users, they open themselves up to actionable feedback. They actively engage citizens on their pain points. Ultimately, they can co-create solutions with them. That’s useful when citizens and their governments face increasingly complex issues which require lots of perspectives and commitment from wide sections of society. Climate change is one such wicked problem for our generation.

Across the world, the idea of government as a platform or co-creation has gained momentum and accumulated different meanings. Here in Singapore, the government has taken the approach of announcing cross-government challenges, setting industry problem statements, and supporting volunteering and fundraising for causes.

We can take inspiration from start-ups and go further, in thinking about how co-creation can be enabled with technology.

Personalisation, collaboration, and the use of real-time feedback from users are integrated into the fundamental features of the apps we use daily. Our social media feeds are personalised to our interests, and incessantly refined in response to our demographics and behaviour. How about collaboration? Tools which make this possible in real time have become part of everyday life for many, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and working from home in response. We’ve used video-conferencing to brainstorm. We sketch out initial thoughts and flesh out plans with others. Other apps we use regularly anticipate what we want to do with them. Our email provider, for example, might take note of the context in a message and suggest auto-completed text.

So what would happen if governments started from the same place as start-ups in designing services? Imagine what public service work would look like if public servants were able to identify individuals’ sentiments, bring together different perspectives on a problem these users faced, and marshal deep expertise across society to bear on these issues. The point is that start-ups have been doing this for years. In fact, by using crowdfunding platforms, users have put up their own money to see solutions to their problems become a reality. These crowdfunding platforms have also been used to address problems in society.

For governments, having a monopoly on public services is both a good and a bad thing. Governments may be accused of not being responsive to their users, despite knowing a lot about their citizens. But they also have deep experience of delivering public services, and have a mandate from citizens to serve.

So what would happen if governments learned from start-ups about focusing on users? Public servants might find themselves much more capable of creating change. — Ng Kaijie

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