Potential for improving public services by exploring citizens’ communication to public organizations in Sweden

Abstract: Little et al., (1971) define citizen feedback as information from citizens directed to societal institutions, particularly government, to improve their functioning. Citizen feedback can further be categorized into service feedback, which includes inquiries, requests, complaints, and involvement feedback, which includes opinions, suggestions, and volunteering. There is a great dissonance between the amount of service feedback available to government organizations and its use in development and improvement of public services and policies. There is literature available that suggests governments use of social media for collecting citizen feedback. But very little research has been done to study that government organizations analyze direct communication to collect citizen feedback and what ICT tools they use or would like to use. This becomes even more relevant in countries with high eGovernment maturity with more availability of service feedback through a combination of traditional and newer channels. Therefore, this study investigates the above-mentioned research problem by answering the following two related research questions: 1) How do Swedish public organizations gather and utilize the wealth of information about citizens' needs available in the direct communication from citizens to public organizations? A) is the content of the direct communication between citizens and public organizations actionable? B) And is the volume of the communication sufficient to make it actionable 2) What kind of ICT tool support the public organizations would like to have in order to better utilize the aforementioned information? For the study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six public officers from Swedish public organizations. The respondents were individuals working within customer relations departments of public organizations in Sweden. The respondents were not only involved in the registration, collection, analysis, and resolution of customer inquiries but also in improvement of processes and services. The interviews were conducted in Swedish, recorded and transcribed, and the transcripts were translated into English. The transcripts were then analyzed in the form of a thematic analysis following the principles of Braun & Clarke (2006). The analysis led to the discovery of five themes namely 1) Types of inquiries 2) Frequent inquiries 3) Contact channels 4) Utilization of direct communication 5) ICT tool support The study highlights the various ways in which Swedish public organizations gather and utilize service feedback. In the gathering phase, multiple channels are offered to citizens. The use of traditional channels remain high for the problem area of information supply. In the utilization phase, various strategies are used depending on eGovernment maturity. Every public organization is required to maintain a “diarium” because of laws on record keeping for transparency purposes, it is a common tool for registering citizen inquiries, and also a source for annual performance and quality reporting. Additionally, LIME CRM system is used by some organizations, citizen opinions received through webforms is analysed, phone calls recorded and analysed. Lack of alignment is a challenge for some public organizations. There is little evidence to suggest that data from various sources is integrated into a centralized CRM system, leading to insight into citizen preferences, behavior or trends.