A recent visa application experience for a country that rhymes with ‘esoterica’ (there really aren’t many words that rhyme with this place) brought back into focus the need for a deliberate approach to improving CX in situations of public (or government) monopolies.
I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that from the digital to the physical, through every stage of the process the experience was a combination of the following: clunky, verbose, unclear, inconsistent, redundant, aggressive, repetitive and disconnected… I would go on but I’m running out of adjectives.
A visa application is a prime example of a public monopoly, the need for centralisation and control are sufficiently high, and the current integration with connected legacy systems are such that privatisation is not practical.
But this can put the provision of a service in danger of falling prey to the classic symptoms that arise from lack of competitive forces and weak governance. Namely, an insufficient impetus for customer-centric innovation and improvement, which for you and I ultimately manifests as a user-hostile experience.
The example above is an infrequent enough occurrence for most that people will largely just roll their eyes, brush it off, and go about their lives. But there are systems like this which people have to contend with consistently enough that it can have a tangible impact on their wellbeing.
Of course, there are exponentially larger problems in the world than solving visa application bureaucracy, but at the same time, there are people dedicating their time to solving much smaller issues.
If our collective goal as a species is the betterment of the human experience for all, one area to focus our attention is the challenge of creating systems that, in the absence of competitive forces, incentivise and motivate the design of better experiences rather than rewarding stagnation.