A tale of (lack of) digital transformation in the public administration.
How registering a baby on the Italian civil registry turned into an example of bad service, and how it could be fixed with a bit of modern thinking.
“But to get to the Contact page you have to go to the Homepage first, don’t you?” The Consulate employee on the phone was adamant. Search engines and direct links didn’t exist in her mind. She was also quite angry at me for not knowing that there is only one way to navigate a website: starting from the homepage. How dared I say otherwise? And how silly of me to check the Contact page for contact data!
This infuriating conversation sparked a reflection about digital transformation in the public administration. But to get to that, you need to know the whole story.
Because you’re nobody these days if you don’t tell a story
My girlfriend and I live in Barcelona. She’s Spanish, I’m Italian. Seven months ago we had a daughter, and we decided to register her on the Italian civil registry, so she could get her Italian citizenship. This whole process could have been solved for me as a user in five minutes, at the hospital, when we registered her on the Spanish one. In my ideal world, right there and then I should have been handed an additional form asking me if I wanted to register my daughter on the Italian civil registry too. Mark the checkbox. First Vicidomini with a double nationality ever. Done. I’ll get back to this point further on.
The reality is being, quite obviously, very different.
First point of frustration: retrieving the list of documents
First, we had to retrieve the list of documents. To be honest, finding the page on the website of the Italian consulate in Barcelona was quite easy. Good SEO there. But the language used in the page is very bureaucratic and not easy to understand at all. One of the documents listed is a form that deserves a post of its own because of its typos and usability problems. A couple more were different versions of the Spanish civil registry, whose request process is also material for another post. We also found out that the documents had to be printed and sent to the consulate by ordinary mail.
But printing a bunch of documents is, as you can imagine, the easy part.
The fun began once I had all the documents ready and needed to know the address of the Italian consulate so I could send them.
Second point of frustration: multiple addresses.
I found the Contact page of the consulate and there was, of course, an address. The Italian consulate in Barcelona is famous for its lack of efficiency and reliability (in the words of one Google reviewer, “if an Italian as a paperwork problem in Barcelona, he’s alone”). So, just for peace of mind, I also searched for the consulate on Google Maps and the address was different. So I thought the best way to know was to just call and ask.
Third point of frustration: wrong phone number.
I called the number I found on the Contact page and an automated voice told me that that number wasn’t working anymore, and gave me a new one. Both are expensive toll numbers (about 1,27€ per minute from a cell phone). I called the second number, and everything went pear shaped.
Fourth point of frustration: being treated like an idiot.
I called the second phone number and a consulate employee answered. Right off the bat this person had a tense tone of voice, as if not wanting to be there, so please try to picture the conversation as if with every single sentence she sounded like she was actually telling me “You’re an idiot”.
Employee: “Italian Consulate, how can I help you?”
Me: “Good morning, could you tell me the address of the consulate, please? Thanks!”
Employee: “First of all, be clear. Why do you need our address?”
I really wanted to answer: “I just like to call random numbers and ask people for their address”, but I kept my inner Chandler at bay and managed a serious answer. Thank you fatherhood for making me a respectable citizen.
Me: “Well, we’ve had a daughter and we want her to be registered on the Italian civil registry. We have the documentation ready but I’ve found two different addresses, one on your Contact page, and one on Google Maps, so I don’t know where to send them.”
Employee: “That’s because we’re changing offices, but you still have to send documentation to the old address. If you read our website carefully, it’s written there.”
Me: “Well, I’m on the Contact page and I just see one address.”
Employee: “Have you got our website in front of you?”
Me: “Yes.”
Employee: “It’s written there.”
Me: “I’m on the Contact page and I just see one address.”
Employee: “You have to look at the homepage, it’s said really explicitly there that we’re moving to a new office, but you still have to send documentation to the old address.”
Me: “But I’m not on the homepage, I’m on the Contact page”.
Employee: “But to get to the Contact page you have to go to the Homepage first, don’t you?”
At this point I really started shouting and used one of my “never use this sentence if you don’t want to sound like an a**hole” sentences, you’ll understand which one by yourself.
Me: “No, you don’t. I may be coming from a web search or a direct link. I do this for a living.”
Employee: “It’s explained on the homepage.”
At this point I gave up.
Me: “Is this your answer to my problem?”
Employee: “Yes.”
Me: “Can you confirm that the address on Maps is where I have to send the paperwork?”
Employee: “Yes.”
Me: “Goodbye.”
I hung up, wrote the address on the envelope. My girlfriend was going out so she took the envelope to the Post office and sent it. Then we tried to forget about it, except, point 4.
Fifth point of frustration
Two months after sending the documentation, we have received no update whatsoever.
What’s this rant about?
All the time, while I was going through this despicable service I kept thinking about how it should have been. After all, being a designer is not something that you can turn on and off, is it?
I shouldn’t have been too surprised about this all mess. We’re talking about a country whose Minister of Public Administration just a month ago spoke against remote work in the PA, saying it was necessary during the pandemic emergency, but not a good idea in the long term.
The person I spoke with isn’t the problem. The problem is: why are our public employees’ skills so outdated that the person I spoke with was totally unable to receive any kind of feedback, felt the right to shout at me for not being happy with their service, and didn’t even have a general understanding of how the World Wide Web works?
Proof of the consulate inability to receive feedback and give a decent service is the fact that over a month after that call, their address and phone number on their own Contact page were still wrong. Two months after the call, the address has been fixed, but not the phone number. How many people have sent documents to the wrong address meanwhile? How many had to make one useless call to a wrong, expensive toll number? How little do the people at the consulate have to care not to make such a small fix in a month? Do they even understand that they are service providers?
How could this miserable journey be fixed? To answer, I’ll use two sources:
- Jared Spool’s theories about user journeys;
- Professor David Rogers theories about digital customer behaviours and data (if you haven’t read “Digital transformation playbook” yet, do yourself a favour and do it).
Jared Spool often mentions that in order to improve an experience one should always start from research. Specifically, from the current user journey. Knowing the journey means knowing how the user feel at every step of the process, on a scale from extremely frustrated to extremely delighted. And once you know that, and why people feel delighted or frustrated at each point, you can start thinking about how to improve each one of those steps and turn the current journey into an aspirational one: one that is delightful all the way through.
I find this idea of starting from the current journey and define the aspirational one really elegant. So that’s what I did. I mapped out my user journey of trying to get my daughter registered at the Italian civil registry from Spain.
I’d like to focus on the second part of the map first, the one where the Italian consulate is the actor involved. If you look at opportunities and pitfall, you’ll see that most of them are actually very easy things to improve:
- use understandable language
- avoid typos (you’re a consulate, for f*** sake)
- fix the layout of the request form
- have reliable contact data on your website
- use a toll free phone number
- have trained people doing front office, that are able to clarify doubts and gather feedback
- give people the possibility to send the paperwork over electronically
- give people feedback on the request status.
Just by fixing those simple things, the whole journey could be so much better. And with such a small implementation cost.
Sounds nice, right? Except, it doesn’t. Having the right data on your Contact page doesn’t make the cut. It’s a basic expectation, and meeting basic expectations is not the only thing we should expect from public administrations. We should expect them to lead the digital transformation of our society. We should expect them to go way above and beyond our expectations.
Digital transformation in the PA is about providing citizens with services that are more useful, faster, easier, cheaper, paperless, environmentally friendly and more accessible.
As I said at the beginning of this post, just give me the possibility to register my daughter on the Italian civil registry directly at the hospital, when I am already registering her on the Spanish one. Make the whole journey easier and shorter from as upstream as possible. Cut the duration of it all from seven months to 6 days. Both my girlfriend and I were there, we both had our IDs ready to identify ourselves, we had the hospital documentation and the employees there were creating the documents of which I would then have to ask the copies for that whole mess of a process I went through. Then digitally send all those documents to the Italian administration, and let me know when my daughter has been registered. Yes, it would mean that both Spanish and Italian administrations should put processes in place to do that. It would need a change of tools, skills and mindset. But that’s why it’s called digital transformation. If it were easy it would be called digital slight adjustment. And they would be able to provide me with the short and sweet journey that you can see here below.
This fits well with David Roger’s theories of the digital transformation¹, particularly with three points:
- the need for access: as a digital customer, I want services that are faster, easier, everywhere, always on for me.
- the need for customisation²: as a digital customer, I want services that are tailored to my specific needs
- the new use that companies (or public administrations, in this case) have to make of data: data are not to be considered a byproduct of daily work anymore, but a valuable asset to find new ways of doing things. The problem is, that in most cases companies or PAs have no idea what to do with the data they have. Why asking me to retrieve copies of a bunch of documents and send them over ordinary mail when you already have those data?
As months go by and I still have no idea of the status of my request, I keep thinking about how easy it could have been for me, if the actors involved would have known how to properly use data so that all the actions I had to take manually could have happened almost automatically in the background. Instead, I had to listen to a public employee yelling at me that it was fine if they had wrong contact information on their Contact page because “we say it on the homepage”, and that “you have to go through the homepage to get to the Contact page”.
[1] Again, do yourself a favour and read that book. “Digital transformation” has replaced “less is more” as a buzzword, but just like its predecessor, most of the times you hear people talking about it without a deep understanding of it. In the case of digital transformation, most people, even self professed gurus, try to sell it as if it meant “have a website”. Professor Rogers book is clear, precise, thorough, and gives you tools to actually understand and lead the digital transformation.
[2] I disagree with the use of the word “customisation” in this case. I believe what professor Rogers refers to should be called “personalisation” instead.
- Personalisation is received by customers, e.g. Netflix suggests you what to see based on what they know about you.
- Customisation is performed by customers, e.g. you can create your own Netflix watch list, or change your desktop background image.
