Here’s a small experiment. Think about the last time you renewed something, applied for something, or lodged something with a government agency. Now think about the last time you ordered dinner through an app.
One of those took ninety seconds and told you exactly where things stood the whole way through. The other one, statistically speaking, probably didn’t.
That comparison feels unfair. It isn’t. Because the person doing the comparing is the citizen, and they do it whether anyone likes it or not. Research across the Asia-Pacific found that citizens don’t evaluate government services in isolation. They benchmark them against banks, eCommerce platforms and delivery apps, the best digital experiences they encounter anywhere. Nobody lowers their expectations when the URL ends in .gov.au.
The bar moved. Most agencies didn’t move with it.
The numbers on this are blunt. PwC’s Citizen Survey found that 81% of Australians expect a request to government to be resolved in a single interaction, and more than 85% rank speed, simplicity and convenience as priorities. That’s not an aspiration for 2030. That’s what people expected years ago.
And here’s the part that should genuinely worry public sector leaders. The 2025 Digital Citizen Report found that only 34% of Australians use government websites as their first port of call during key life events. More people turn to friends and family, or just Google it.
Sit with that for a second. A new parent, someone who’s just lost a job, someone caring for an ageing relative. The moment they most need government, two thirds of them look somewhere else first. Not because the services don’t exist. Because finding and using them feels like hard work, and people have learned to route around hard work.
Satisfied is not the same as trusting
There’s a trap in the data that catches a lot of agencies. Satisfaction scores often look fine. The APS’s own Citizen Experience Survey found satisfaction sitting well above trust, with people least satisfied with being kept aware of progress and wait times, and only a quarter trusting public services to implement the changes needed to meet everyone’s needs.
Translation: people think your staff are polite and knowledgeable. They just don’t believe the system around those staff will come through for them.
That gap between satisfaction and trust is where citizen experience lives. It’s not about the moment someone talks to a human. It’s everything around that moment. The form that asks for information the agency already holds. The application that vanishes into silence for six weeks. The three departments that clearly don’t talk to each other, because the citizen has now explained their situation three times.
Eighty percent of citizens want connected services that link processes across departments. They don’t care about your org chart. They see one government, and they expect it to behave like one.
The honest bit
We work with public sector organisations, so let’s be upfront about what technology can and can’t do here.
It can’t fix a policy that’s genuinely complicated. It can’t fix procurement cycles. And a shiny portal bolted onto a broken back office just moves the frustration online, which is arguably worse, because now the citizen can be frustrated at 11pm as well.
What it can do is remove the friction that has nothing to do with policy. Most of the pain citizens feel isn’t caused by legislation. It’s caused by case information scattered across systems, manual handoffs between teams, and staff who spend their days re-keying data instead of helping people. Fix the plumbing and the experience improves almost by accident, because your people finally have the full picture in front of them when a citizen calls.
That’s the unglamorous truth about citizen experience. It’s mostly an integration and data problem wearing a customer service costume.
What “ready” actually looks like
If you lead a public sector team and want a practical read on where you stand, three questions do most of the work:
Can a citizen see where their request is up to, without ringing you? Progress visibility was one of the lowest-scoring items in the APS survey. It’s also one of the most fixable. A status update is not a moonshot.
Does your frontline staff member see the whole citizen, or a fragment? If answering one enquiry means toggling between four systems, your experience problem is really a systems problem, and no amount of customer service training will out-run it.
When something changes, how long does it take your systems to catch up? New program, new regulation, machinery-of-government change. If the answer is “a nine-month IT project”, citizens will feel that lag as unresponsiveness, even though nobody intended it.
If those answers made you wince, you’re in good company. Most agencies are somewhere on this journey. The ones making real progress tend to share one habit: they design from the citizen’s life event backwards, not from the department’s structure outwards. The APS’s own research on service delivery reached the same conclusion: people want a trusted one-stop experience that doesn’t mirror government’s internal structures.
The gap is a choice now
Ten years ago, an agency could reasonably say the technology to deliver private-sector-grade experiences on a public-sector budget didn’t really exist. That excuse has expired. Platforms like Salesforce, built properly around how citizens and case workers actually operate, handle the unglamorous plumbing: one view of the citizen, automated status updates, workflows that flex when policy does.
The word “properly” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. We’ve spent years fixing implementations that treated government like a slightly beige version of retail. It isn’t. Data sovereignty matters. Accessibility isn’t optional. Procurement has rules for good reasons. Getting citizen experience right in the Australian public sector means designing for those constraints from day one, with a team that’s onshore, understands the context, and starts with the humans on both sides of the counter. That’s the work we do, and it’s why our public sector projects start with people and process before anyone touches a config screen.
Citizens have already decided what good looks like. Their bank showed them. The only open question is how long the gap stays open at your agency.
If you’re weighing that up, we’re happy to talk it through. No pitch, just a conversation about where your service experience is losing people, and what closing the gap would actually take.
