Government services have become increasingly digital. But have they become easier to use?
Public sector organisations track a wide range of performance measures, including digital adoption, transaction volumes, service levels, processing times, and customer satisfaction. These metrics help leaders understand how services are performing.
Yet one critical question is often missing from executive dashboards: How hard is it for citizens to achieve their goal?
Citizen effort directly affects service outcomes. The harder a task is to complete, the more likely people are to abandon it, contact support teams, submit duplicate requests, or require additional assistance. As digital services mature, understanding citizen effort may be just as important as measuring operational performance.
What performance metrics don’t show
Most organisations monitor:
- Digital adoption rates
- Transaction volumes
- Contact volumes
- Service levels
- Customer satisfaction
- Processing times
These metrics reveal what is happening within a service, but not necessarily how easy it is to use.
A service can achieve high digital adoption while remaining confusing or difficult to navigate. A transaction can be completed successfully but still require multiple attempts, external guidance, or support from staff.
In short, a service can be digital without being easy.
The missing measure: Citizen effort
Citizen effort measures how much work people must do to complete a task successfully.
When evaluating a service, organisations should ask themselves:
- Do citizens understand what is being asked of them?
- Do they know what information they need to complete a task?
- Are they confident they are following the correct process?
- Do they need to leave the service to find answers?
- Do they require additional support to complete their journey?
The more effort required, the greater the risk of abandonment, frustration, and avoidable demand.
High effort creates high demand
When people encounter obstacles, they rarely abandon their objective altogether. Instead, citizens look for another way forward.
This means contacting support teams, seeking clarification, restarting applications, or delaying the completion of tasks until they feel more confident. It’s easy to see, then, how a user experience issue can quickly become an operational problem.
Digital services are intended to improve accessibility and efficiency through self-service. But when citizens cannot complete journeys independently, demand simply shifts elsewhere in the organisation, increasing support costs and placing additional pressure on frontline teams.
This raises an important leadership question: How much of today’s demand is being created by the service itself?
Moving beyond access
The first phase of digital transformation focused on:
- Making services available online
- Expanding digital channels
- Increasing digital adoption
These goals remain relevant and important. But as services mature, success should be measured by more than availability.
Today, the real test is whether citizens can complete tasks successfully and independently.
The gap between starting a journey and completing it often reveals where effort exists. The wider that gap becomes, the more likely organisations are to see abandonment, support requests, and unnecessary demand.
A metric that deserves executive attention
Citizen effort rarely appears alongside service levels, processing times, or transaction volumes. Yet it influences many of the outcomes organisations care about most, including:
- Service completion rates
- User confidence
- Demand on support teams
- Digital adoption
- Overall service experience
The question is no longer whether a service is available online, but whether people can use it successfully without additional help.
The next stage of digital service completion
The next stage of digital transformation extends beyond digitising services to making them easier to access, navigate, and use.
By making it easier for citizens to successfully achieve their goals, organisations improve their own outcomes, reducing avoidable demand and increasing the value of their digital investments.
Before a support enquiry is raised, before an application is abandoned, and before a journey is restarted, there is usually a simpler question worth asking:
How hard was it for the citizen to complete the service in the first place?
