This article is written by Chetan Choudhury, government advisor, United Arab Emirates.

The notions of “customer” and “customer experience” may seem like they don’t fit in government’s vocabulary at first glance. But in the current “on-demand” age, governments are being pushed to move beyond a citizen perspective and open their eyes to their customers.

For businesses, delivering good customer service is no longer a choice. It is now an imperative to both survival and success. The rationale for government entities to enhance the “citizen experience”, or “customer experience” in other words, may be just as important and compelling.

Customer service is challenging in any field. At best, the customer service experience is quick and pleasant. At worst, it can be time-consuming and laborious. As AI and robots take on many of the jobs in the customer service sector, the possibility and even necessity of injecting more empathy into the sector becomes more important than ever before.

One way this is already happening is through the rise of the empathy economy, which in many ways is revolutionising the sector. Just look at Google. The internet giant tailors services to individuals in a hyper-personal manner. The result is a clean and fast experience for users whenever they use email, search, or any Google products. Governments too can follow this path by establishing their own empathy economy model that places the needs of residents and citizens at the core of their operating framework.

What is the empathy economy?

An empathy economy is based on the monetary or business value created by AI and other technological innovations, that detect and simulate human emotions. This can be transformative in a number of sectors, such as customer service, virtual assistants, robotics, government, healthcare, and transportation among other things.

Let us look at an example: a company called Cogito, based out of Boston in the US, is helping call centres bring empathy back into their conversations through an AI tool. This emotional AI tool, created through research on the potential of social signals in human communication by professors at MIT Dynamics, targets vocal changes of customers and interprets them for emotional clues the same way we do. AI is thus helping employees to be more empathetic, which in turn is translating to happier customers, increased loyalty, more engaged employees and ultimately improved business results.

Good customer experiences rub off on the brand, and in the case of government, these interactions can range from applying for a driver’s license to paying water bills

Several surveys, including a detailed study on customer experience by the consulting firm PwC, have found that people’s perceptions of a company or government are deeply impacted by customer service interactions. Good customer experiences rub off on the brand, and in the case of government, these interactions can range from applying for a driver’s license to paying water bills. This implies that one easy way to improve the happiness and satisfaction of residents and citizens is through providing better service and experience to them. In fact, sometimes simple steps like talking directly to constituents or saving some precious time for them though tech-enabled solutions could lead to impressive results.

This is the case in work done by a group of ambitious students at the University of Illinois in the United States, who found constructive ways that data could be used to increase the role of empathy in city government. Using the town of Champaign, Illinois, as their canvas, they created several initiatives including new city applications that would help residents get the services they need and save time in the process. The young students began working solely with existing data but started getting solid results as soon as they pivoted their focus on the people. They engaged with the residents, directly dealing with issues like potholes and flooding roads or basements in various ways, including conducting personal interviews with residents and collecting and analysing local social media data.

A chatbot for government

Technology — with automation, connected devices and AI — has been the key catalyst in enabling an exponential shift in the way organisations today are approaching customer service to respond to the new age customer and his expectations.

More and more businesses are using AI and machine learning to not only automate daily operations and analyse customer data, but also to demonstrate more empathy in the way they serve customers. A number of federal, state and local government entities have been taking cues from the private sector and training AI algorithms and customer service chatbots to demonstrate more empathy with customers and make their lives easier.

In the United Arab Emirates, we have been experimenting with chatbots since 2016 and various government agencies have been trying to employ chatbots to attain efficiencies. The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) in Dubai, the largest city in the country, uses an AI chatbot to answer customer enquiries. Launched in 2018, the system is bilingual (Arabic/English), and is one of the most extensive automated conversation systems in the region in terms of the number of services covered (almost 90 informational, interactive and transactional services).

One of the agency's strategic goals is to increase people's happiness, and it uses such technologies to save time and effort for customers at the same time being cognisant of their privacy, and thereby enhance their satisfaction

The chatbot has enabled RTA to handle more requests (in one particular month, the system carried out 81,000 conversations), respond faster (average time of call response recently clocked at 14 seconds, well under the planned 20 seconds response time), and complement the legacy call centres that have been handling close to 6,500 calls per day. In 2019, the same agency also introduced a first of its kind AI powered Customers Happiness Index.

Smart AI-driven cameras installed in a few customer service centres analyse facial expressions of clients before and after the processing of their transactions without saving images for privacy considerations, and provide instant feeds on customer happiness rating in that centre to decision-makers to take action. One of the agency's strategic goals is to increase people's happiness, and it uses such technologies to save time and effort for customers at the same time being cognizant of their privacy, and thereby enhance their satisfaction. RTA, thus, stands at the forefront of the modern empathy economy in the UAE.

Putting citizens at the heart of governing

These are some of the several examples of empathy-driven AI deployments transforming customer services in the government across the nation. Some other significant examples include: the AI-powered Rammas solution to handle customer enquiries (handled about 700,000 enquiries in the first year of operations) by the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA), and the AI-powered advisor Rashid, which was created by Smart Dubai to answer questions of residents and tourists on many topics such as starting business, transportation, licensing, visas and residency, passports and certificates attestation, entertainment, shopping, etc.

Just as the current wave in empathy economy is being driven by a slew of AI-based conversational systems reshaping customer service, the next wave could well emerge from AI-driven personal technology (e.g. wearables, VR headsets, smartphones, connected home devices, etc.) redefining customer experience scenarios.

Imagine being alerted about a new parking ticket or utility bill with a nudge from a chatbot on your smartwatch. With a simple swipe, the bill is paid for and the entire interaction is done in a matter of moments. No need to make time to visit an office or plan a trip across town. The research firm Gartner predicted in 2018, that 60% of personal technology device vendors (e.g. makers of activity trackers like Fitbit, manufacturers of smart speakers like Echo, Google Home), will use third-party AI-cloud services to enhance functionality and services by 2020, as they start to compete more on the best user experience and the smartness of products than the technology behind it.

A healthy empathy economy drives new talent to the country and serves to ensure that people stay and build the economy further

It will be very interesting to see how different governments adapt around this scenario and make them work to enhance the service experience for their citizens.

As countries like the UAE continue to evolve into leading knowledge economies, empathy will play a critical role in fostering innovation. When people have more time to think and be productive, economic results are clear. A healthy empathy economy drives new talent to the country and serves to ensure that people stay and build the economy further. The most important ingredient in a knowledge economy is people and the UAE’s proactive approach to empathy, as outlined earlier, in government services ensures that people are at the heart of everything the government does. It’s time that other governments took note! — Chetan Choudhury

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)