Poor citizen experience is becoming one of the biggest risks facing public services.
The Government’s State of Digital Government Review found that satisfaction with UK public services had fallen from 79% to 68% over the previous decade. It also found that satisfaction with 70% of the Government’s 75 highest-volume services was below comparable private sector benchmarks.
When services fail citizens, the only options are to escalate, disengage, or go without. Complaints to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman rose 33% in the past year alone, the sharpest increase in over a decade, and roughly £24bn in entitlements goes unclaimed annually, much of it because people cannot navigate the system to claim what they are owed. Every escalation and every citizen who disengages lands back on the same stretched frontline.
Citizen experience is therefore fundamental to protecting vulnerable people, maintaining public trust, and delivering better outcomes with finite resources.
The problem is disconnected experiences
Public sector organisations have invested heavily in digital transformation – some £14bn a year, rising to £20bn over the next spending review period. Yet the fragmentation that investment was meant to fix persists: citizens now juggle more than 44 separate government accounts, and a family whose child qualifies for free school meals may need to apply to up to 15 different services. The issue is not the scale of investment. It is that too many services were never designed around a single, complete citizen journey.
What is eroding trust is not a lack of investment, but services that were never built to work as one. Indeed the Government’s State of Digital Government Review cited “Departments have traditionally been funded, measured, and incentivised in silos, driving local optimisation at the expense of cross-government collaboration. This structural problem directly contributes to fragmented digital transformation efforts.”
This fragmentation creates avoidable demand. When citizens cannot complete a task online or feel uncertain about what happens next, they understandably pick up the phone. Contact volumes rise, waiting times increase, and already stretched employees face greater pressure.
Simply adding more channels will not solve this. A chatbot, website, and telephone service can all work individually while still creating a poor overall experience. What matters is whether those channels are connected and whether the citizen’s context moves between them.
Voice will remain essential
Digital transformation is sometimes framed as a choice between people and technology. Public services demonstrate why this is the wrong distinction.
Many interactions are complex, urgent, or deeply personal. A resident facing homelessness, a family seeking adult social care, or a student navigating clearing may need reassurance and judgement as much as information. In these situations, speaking to another person remains essential.
The purpose of better digital services should therefore not be to force every citizen into self-service. It should be to resolve straightforward needs more effectively while ensuring that human support is available when the situation requires empathy, discretion, or specialist knowledge.
That also means recognising the risk of digital exclusion. The people with the most urgent needs may also be those least able to navigate a complicated digital journey. A service that appears efficient internally but prevents vulnerable citizens from obtaining help is not genuinely effective.
Connected experiences must become the priority
A more citizen-centred model begins with the overall journey rather than the individual channel.
Someone should be able to start an application online, ask a question through webchat, and speak to an adviser without having to explain everything again. The adviser should have the appropriate context to understand what has already happened, what information has been provided, and what the citizen needs next.
This does not require every interaction to be automated. It requires departments, workflows, and communications to work together. When they do, citizens spend less time navigating public sector structures and employees spend less time reconstructing what has already happened.
Connected experiences also make organisational change easier to manage. As councils reorganise and services are redesigned, citizens should not need to understand which department or authority now owns a particular process. The complexity should be managed behind the service, rather than passed on to the person seeking help.
This is the direction the UK has already set for itself. The Blueprint for Modern Digital Government and its 2025–2030 roadmap commit to a shared digital centre of government, so that a citizen’s information and context move with them across departments rather than resetting at every login. That ambition will only be felt by citizens once it reaches the frontline: the contact centre and webchat conversations where the most complex cases still end up.
AI must solve specific public service problems
AI can support this shift, but only if it is applied to clearly defined problems. Putting AI on top of a fragmented journey will not fix it; it may simply allow that journey to fail faster and at greater scale.
Used well, AI can guide citizens towards the right service before they call, answer routine questions, and make self-service journeys easier to complete. It can also help organisations anticipate seasonal demand, such as council tax enquiries, university clearing, or severe-weather disruption, so that resources can be allocated more effectively.
For frontline employees, the opportunity is equally practical. AI can summarise conversations, retrieve relevant policy information, suggest the next appropriate action, and automate after-call administration. This reduces the time employees spend searching systems and updating records, allowing them to concentrate on the cases that require human judgement.
The value should not be measured solely by how many calls are deflected or how quickly an interaction ends. Public sector leaders should ask whether more citizens are receiving the right help, whether vulnerable people are less likely to fall between services, and whether employees have more time for complex work.
Those outcomes matter for staff as well as citizens. Removing repetitive administration and giving employees better information can reduce frustration, improve working conditions, and help organisations retain experienced people whose knowledge is difficult to replace.
Better experiences build stronger public services
Technology alone will not resolve the pressures facing public services. However, connected experiences can help organisations use limited resources more effectively without losing the human support on which many citizens depend.
The strongest public services will be those that use digital technology and AI to remove avoidable friction, protect access to human support, and help frontline employees deliver better outcomes.
Citizens rarely remember which technology powered a public service. They remember whether they were listened to, whether getting help was straightforward, and whether the right support was available when they needed it.
That is the real test of digital transformation: not how much technology a public service deploys, but whether it helps people feel understood, supported, and able to trust the institutions they depend on.
Steve Blood
Steve Blood is VP, Market Intelligence & Evangelism at Five9, a role which draws on more than 30 years’ experience in customer service, combined with thought leadership gleaned from working with customer service executives as a Gartner analyst and advisor for 23 years.
Steve is tasked with identifying emerging CX market trends, understanding customer behavior, and evaluating the competitive landscape in an ever-evolving CX industry.
