In honor of Estonian 102nd “birthday” a vision paper for Bürokratt was published. Government services were supposed to be from now on provided in a way suitable for the 21st century, making them accessible from every device possible, in Estonian and in a conversational manner.
Estonia is not alone in looking towards chatbots as they offer a new way for the government to be connected with their citizens.
These days many of us have smartphones and they are in use for a significant amount of time, it’s thus seen by governments as preferred device of the “client”. And as chatbots aren’t human they are accessible 24/7. And even though everyone is special in their own way, when it comes to the information they might require or services they want to be provided with, these are more often than not the same or very similar. Chatbots can alleviate much of the workload customer service agents (CSA) deal with daily when they just answer the FAQs.
With such positive arguments the case for a chatbot seems almost too obvious. However, here are a few personal observations from having been part of Bürokratt’s core team.
- No civil servant needs to fear being replaced by chatbots. Training any bot will take not only time but people with domain knowledge. Government officials should provide existing CSAs reskilling options, so that they could become chatbot trainers.
- Chatbots should be seen as beneficial additional channels, not the only channel for any service. Some citizens will never start using chatbots (and that’s fine) and some services will never be suitable for chatbots (that, too, is just fine).
- Chatbots are available 24/7 only in theory, at least in the beginning. Fallbacks need to obviously be built into every conversation, but some agencies may for service quality reasons decide that chatbots are online only during working hours, so that a CSA could immediately take over.
- If any governmental agency considers launching their chatbot, they should immediately start collecting their incoming question-answer data. This data will not only act as training data for the future chatbot but will also allow leaders to make a data-driven decision on the need of a chatbot. If the amount of incoming requests in your agency is minimal, you might want to reconsider the investment.
- Some people have had very negative experiences with already existing chatbots, they will be hard to convince to use any governmental chatbots. (Fun added bonus: people are always harder on any governmental service because these matter most.) Just be ready to handle any negative feedback that could negatively affect the number of users of your chatbot.
Governmental chatbots can have a place in almost every agency and they really can improve service quality. They cannot, however, be expected to improve bad processes or expect to magically understand incoming requests without continuous training of their models.