Walking a Mile in Their Shoes—A Citizen Journey to Explore Public Service Delivery from the Citizen Perspective

Abstract

Up to now, public administrations have taken a supply-oriented approach to the design of electronic services for citizens resulting in low usage rates. In contrast, companies in the private sector have been relying on demand-oriented service design for many years. They make use of so-called ‘customer journeys’ to better understand the perception of services by customers and to tailor the design of electronic services to that perception. Although also governments and public administrations have been increasingly recognizing the benefits of customer journeys, there is still a lack of research on the application of customer journeys in the public sector. Especially, there is no customer journey that is applicable to a wide range of public services and serves as a general blueprint for public services. Therefore, in this paper, we present a generic citizen journey that depicts the delivery process for transactional public services from a citizen perspective. The citizen journey depicts the points of interaction that citizens have with public services. We evaluated the citizen journey in a focus group with public servants and a survey with citizens. The evaluation reveals the citizen journey’s general usefulness. Researchers benefit from our citizen journey through a better understanding of the service delivery process and the different steps that could impact citizen experience. Practitioners can use the citizen journey in the design of citizen-centric services and during the actual service delivery to guide citizens through the delivery process.