In a recent discussion with some of our local government, NHS, and housing association customers, they used the phrase “digital evolution” to characterise their plans and communication investments for the next year. Although a subtle semantic difference, it’s an important change from the phrase “digital transformation” that is so often used. They’ve put the fundamentals in place and are now working to refine and optimise how communication technology can be used to support their goals of delivering excellent customer experiences while also being great places to work, remotely or onsite. Essentially, the transformation has happened and now it’s time to evolve.

To better understand their perspective and the possibilities for what’s next, we researched how well current communications capabilities are supporting their digital evolution. The research was conducted in November of 2021 with 456 professionals from healthcare, higher education, local councils, and central government. This blog post is the first in a four part series where I’ll share the detailed findings from that research, broken down into these areas:

  • The customer experience antagonist: current communication systems
  • The generational divide: a wide spectrum of communication requirements
  • Requirements for modernising communications for public sector organisations
  • Taking Microsoft Teams from good to great with a cloud communications platform

The pandemic accelerated their digital evolution activities. Interestingly, the public sector groups were at various different stages in their journey. Overall, 63% of public sector organisations accelerated their digital transformation efforts due to the pandemic:

Pandemic Impact on Digital Transformations

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Breaking that down into the different groups reveals that the Education sector entered the pandemic with 54% of respondents not having plans or not starting their digital transformation efforts, but now are working on it. As expected, government organisations were most likely to accelerate digital transformation work that was already underway. And a surprising proportion of Healthcare organisations (21%) had to put their digital transformation projects on hold.

Pandemic Impact on Digital Transformations by Industry

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What’s driving the need to make these changes? Although it’s possible their responses are a little biased due to experiences over the last two years (eg. see the prominence of “Enabling remote work” in the chart below), the main drivers of digital transformation also included delivering better customer and employee experiences:

What are the main drivers of digital transformation at your organisation?

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There are some very interesting differences between the industry segments regarding this topic. Enabling remote work and delivering better customer and staff experiences are typical reasons, which were confirmed again by public sector professionals:

Main drivers of digital transformation by Industry

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Improving operational efficiency is an example of where the groups differ on an important topic. Operational efficiency is clearly important for all public sector organisations, but government professionals consider it a much more important driver than their healthcare and education peers. Income streams for many government organisations were negatively impacted by the pandemic, and it would appear that IT leaders are adjusting their strategies accordingly. Delivering new services is also an interesting point, with healthcare professionals more likely to call this out as an important driver. For example, preventative healthcare is an increasingly popular option for many service providers which aims to provide long-term cost efficiencies. The pandemic had a big impact on this topic as well.

To further understand changes in priority forced by the pandemic, the research asked, “To what extent have each of the following categories changed in priority since the onset of COVID-19?”

To what extent have each of the following categories changed in priority since the onset of COVID-19?

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Working remotely magnified the challenge of ensuring connectivity. With remote workers needing to rely on the quality of their home internet, control over the experience is now out of IT’s hands. Working remotely, modernising communications, and internet performance instantly became a 3-legged stool that organisations had to enable. How far along an organisation was in their digital transformation journey prior to the pandemic had a big impact on the level of difficulty associated with putting support in place. Additionally, it served as a reminder that moving communications to the cloud requires a network and internet connectivity that has bandwidth capacity for the additional traffic.

These insights from the impact of the pandemic on digital transformations are helpful to understanding why public sector organisations characterise the current situation as digital evolution instead of digital transformation: they’ve worked through the challenges and put solutions in place to get to this point. But it’s not the whole story. Respondents provided additional insights illuminating the complexity of their current environment.

A shared responsibility and the challenges to achieving it

As public sector organisations continue working through challenges from the pandemic, they also have to contend with several additional major changes that are underway:

  • Economic – Sustainability and technology driving new products, services, business models
  • Climate – Dangers to ecosystems and biodiversity, food and energy security
  • Social and cultural – Ensuring inclusion in health, housing, education, employment and life opportunities
  • Population – Growing and ageing

Given the dynamic and complex situation public sector professionals work in every day, we asked them about the customer experience and who actually owns it. Overall, 83% of respondents indicated that everyone in the organisation is responsible for the customer experience. Interestingly, there are differences in the degree to which each group agreed with this point:

To what extent do you agree with the following statement: In today’s market everyone in the organisation is responsible for the customer experience.

83% agree that everyone in the organisation is reponsible for the customer experience

Here's the breakdown by industry:

Education 81%

Government 91%

Healthcare 80%

The respondents can also be grouped into decision makers for the purchase of communications technology and users of the communication system. That perspective reveals the biggest difference between groups with only 75% of communication technology decision makers agreeing that everyone is responsible for customer experience compared to 89% of end users.

Decision makers 75%

Users 89%

One final look at this point from the perspective of years of experience in the current role:

> 5 years 80%

6-15 years 85%

16+ years 87%

Overall, it’s reasonable to conclude that across these public sector organisations, the general consensus is that everyone in the organisation is responsible for delivering the customer experience. That said, there is some work to be done to get the IT department onboard with the idea as they are typically the decision makers for purchasing communications technology.

A complex communications environment has become more complex

The pandemic reminded us about the importance of communications for service delivery and organisational resilience when working remotely became an instant requirement. Unfortunately many public sector roles required advanced capabilities such as telemedicine or remote learning solutions in addition to standard video meetings and cloud communications. Now that organisations have mainly solved the initial challenge, they have an opportunity to optimise their technology investments. But the task before them isn’t trivial. 8x8 conducted research with companies and public sector organisations prior to the pandemic and found that 72% had between two and five communication applications. Another 22% had six or more. The result is 94% of organisations went into the pandemic with a complex communications environment comprising multiple disparate applications.

Given all the changes over the last two years, the majority of organisations are still managing a complex environment containing multiple communication applications. Now,55% of organisations have more communication applications than they did prior to the pandemic, while 34% have about the same number:

Which of the following best describes your current communications applications compared to the pre-pandemic (i.e., COVID-19) period?

Number of communications applications now compared to the pre-pandemic

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Progress has also happened with communications, as 40% indicated their current system consists of one platform with integrated communications capabilities. Unfortunately, that also means 60% are using multiple applications for business communications that are sub-optimising the user experience, not taking advantage of potential cost savings, and definitely not leveraging the analytics, decision intelligence, and automation potential locked in all those applications.

Opportunity to take Microsoft Teams from good to great

Microsoft did an outstanding job with helping public sector organisations use Microsoft Teams to help support remote working. So good, in fact, that 92% of public sector organisations indicate they use Microsoft Teams.

As impressive as that adoption has been, organisations now have to incorporate Microsoft Teams-based workflows into the rest of how their organisations work. The research also asked how Teams is being used today. Essentially, Teams is being used for internal collaboration using video meetings and messaging. That’s a great starting point that helped organisations quickly support remote working. But, there are many areas of communications, such as contact centre, that Teams doesn’t provide which adds to the complexity of current environments.

How are Microsoft Teams used in your organisation today?

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It’s a great start, but now public sector organisations are challenged with creating a more consistent experience for Teams and non-Teams users. For example, a large portion of calls coming into an NHS Trust go through the switchboard. Microsoft Teams doesn’t have a switchboard capability, so they certify the integration with third-party solutions like 8x8. Contact centre, switchboard, global calling plans, and common area phones are just a few examples of how organisations can extend Microsoft Teams capabilities.

A good foundation for what’s next

It’s clear from the research that public sector organisations have accelerated their digital transformations to strengthen organisational and service delivery resilience by enabling hybrid work models while also enhancing the customer and staff experience. The goal of enabling everyone to be responsible for the customer experience is still facing headwinds from a complex environment created by having several communication applications. They also have the additional challenge of accelerating their ROI on the Microsoft Teams investment by extending the capabilities to include other areas of the organisation such as the contact centre.

To discuss bringing together your public sector contact centre, voice, video conferencing, and chat solution on one experience communication platform please get in touch.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I reveal how differences in the way each generation wants to communicate are creating a generational divide and how that’s impacting public sector organisations’ ability to deliver excellent customer experiences.