4 customer experience insights from the Singapore government

In many parts of the world, government and good customer experience are poles apart. That’s not the case in Singapore.

The LIKE.TG Customer Experience Intelligence Report for Singapore found that 82% of Singaporeans feel their government provides customer service of a quality equal or superior to that of the private sector. And 85% of citizens believe Singapore is widely regarded as a world leader in citizen experience quality.

This is no accident. It’s the result of a clear strategy and consistent execution. From my time in public service to corporate leadership, I’ve witnessed firsthand the evolution of Singapore’s government to raise the bar in citizen-centric innovation. Here are four customer experience insights that may help leaders in the public and private sectors.

1. Put the whole above its parts

One thing that distinguishes the Singapore government’s customer experience is its unity. All digital public services can be accessed through the country’s Singpass system, a single sign-on mechanism linked to each Singaporean resident’s national identity card. Singpass makes transferring data between departments and agencies seamless.

The government also continues to make strong progress on its “No Wrong Door” policy, whereby citizens are promptly routed to the right agency for their situation—regardless of the agency or channel they initially contacted. This is particularly relevant for complex transactions such as business licensing.

For example, instead of going to different agencies for health, environment, and public safety, entrepreneurs should be able to contact any one agency to handle the entire process.

This aligns with what citizens increasingly want and expect. Our research found 37% of Singaporeans want more connectivity between government services, while 45% want to reduce the number of people they need to speak to from different departments.

A unified experience is especially important to the six in 10 Singaporeans who rank repeating themselves to multiple people as one of their top customer experience gripes.

To create a truly unified experience, leaders can start by bridging departmental silos with common threads such as centralized identity management or single sign-on. These can pave the way for more integrated services and synchronized responses to customer issues, ideally built on a common platform and data model that connects the dots without having to rip and replace decades of prior technology investment.

2. Acknowledge customers’ expectations

Consumer apps and digital channels have set entirely new standards for customer experience. Citizens don’t expect anything less from government—something Singapore acknowledged early on in exercises such as its Smart Nation strategy.

Besides defining bold targets around citizen and business satisfaction with government services, the strategy held public servants accountable to adopt specific improvements, such as support for prefilled digital forms, e-signing, and e-payments.

These improvements matched the best customer experiences in the private sector and made the citizen experience faster and more efficient as a whole—something one in two Singaporeans demand from government today, according to our research.

A more unified customer experience will only take hold if it’s built on a strong understanding of customers’ expectations and challenges. Tools for sentiment analysis and process mining can better quantify how customers are feeling and what processes are letting them down. Making public servants accountable for continuously improving these metrics is the real key to effective policy and strategy.

3. Don’t take trust for granted

When services are digitized at scale, any attack or downtime has a multiplied effect on citizens. The impact on public trust is particularly severe: More than 80% of Singaporeans say that if a company gets hacked and loses their data, they’ll stop using it.

In addition, 70% have less trust in companies today to keep their data safe than they did a year ago. As a result, cyber resilience and risk management are constantly prioritized and communicated by the Singaporean government.

Systems like Singpass boast an enviable track record of defending against data breaches while the government invests continuously in ensuring citizens are alerted to potential cyberthreats.

For leaders, the lesson is simple: Put cybersecurity at the core or risk losing the trust of customers. Adopting strategies to automate compliance and minimize exposure to cyberthreats, with regular audits of cyber processes enterprise wide, can go a long way to safeguarding public trust in customer experience.

4. Instill an efficiency culture

Singapore’s public sector has a constant drive for greater efficiency. Every year demands greater productivity and automation, with the savings being reinvested into improved customer experience and areas such as infrastructure, skills, and welfare.

Any leader who can deliver these efficiency dividends will likely enjoy greater support for their own agenda. Technologies such as generative AI (GenAI) can provide a significant efficiency boost. Case summaries generated by our Now Assist GenAI experiences are helping agents eliminate tedious review work more than 50% of the time.

Leaders will also benefit from encouraging their teams to innovate for efficiency that serves the public interest, rewarding solutions that can do more faster without compromising accuracy, empathy, or security.

The time is now

Singapore’s government has been investing in the strategy and technology of world-class customer experiences for decades. As the proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

Customers can’t wait for a more cohesive, efficient customer experience. Neither can governments or enterprises if they want to achieve their targeted business outcomes.

Find out how LIKE.TG helps organizations deliver frictionless customer experiences.

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