Online Government Services offer few Improvements, says EU

As few as a third of European users of e-government services rate the services as an improvement over their offline counterparts, suggests research from the European Commission.

The largest survey so far on how the users of European websites perceive the benefits of public e-services has just been published, reporting on the opinions of more than 48,000 actual users of a range of e-services in a number of countries. The survey considers their usage of, and satisfaction with, these services. The researchers say the survey is only intended to provide snapshot of the opinion of a significant number of actual users of current public e-services.

The survey consisted of two phases:
* Gathering information from service providers on the extent to which public services are being used via on-line channels compared to traditional channels;
* Analysing how well these on-line services are meeting the needs and expectations of the actual users, through an online questionnaire linked to the service (reported here).

The study shows how the users perceive the quality of public e-services. Generally the user satisfaction is high. More than 60% of the users are very satisfied with the service. Furthermore, more than 75% of the users indicate that they will recommend the service to people they know. The result is a clear indication that these early users are e-service ambassadors in Europe and a driving force in disseminating knowledge about public e-services.

However, service improvements (other than the convenience of having the service on-line) are only experienced by 30-40% of the users. This indicates that many of the current generation of public e-services are off-line services converted for on-line use without further development and optimisation of the services. Fundamental process integration (back office) and improved service delivery (front office) is needed to create integrated services and thus achieve the combined benefits of both strategies.

'The survey identified that improving general usability along with being able to easily find the service are still important issues to be addressed to improve user satisfaction:
* The most important action item in order to improve value for citizens is to make the services easy to use and to provide better help regarding the e-service on the website.
* The most important action item in order to improve the value for businesses is to make websites easy to find and offer savings.'

In the transformation of services from off-line to on-line, the benefits most widely reported by users are saving time and gaining flexibility. These benefits are closely related with the channel improvement. The users can access the service on-line at home, 24-hours-a-day, as opposed to only during office hours at the local public service centre. The survey also shows that there are significant amounts of time to be saved using the public services on-line compared to off-line. The average on-line transaction for citizens saves approximately 69 minutes compared to the same transaction completed off-line. The most important reason for users to use the service on-line - namely saving time - is to a high degree being rewarded and that there is a great potential for time saving in further development of the on-line service. For each transaction completed on-line, the average saved time by businesses is approximately 61 minutes.

'The time saved for citizens is a positive societal benefit that might encourage more on-line use. The time saved by businesses provides direct economical benefit. All in all there is a huge potential for saving both time and money for users of public services by going on-line.'

Associated Link: User Satisfaction and Usage Survey of eGovernment services

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