Reliable Tech or Bust: Build Customer Trust with Consistency

Customer trust can be dispelled in an instant. A particularly unpleasant experience can wipe away years of trust. Building and maintaining customer trust is a long game that never ends, and the fuel to go the distance is reliability and consistency. There are no shortcuts. It’s a slow build. Brick by brick, good experience after good experience. 

This has proven especially true in the private sector. But customers of public sector organizations, like local governments or utilities, are now holding them to higher standards that mirror the experiences of their engagement in the private sector. It’s easy to move your business from one company to another, but it is a much bigger effort to move essential services to another local utility or move residence to benefit from better experiences provided by another municipality. 

The biggest momentum of change in the public sector is apparent in FinTech and payment processing. Governments and utilities are choosing to adopt new technology to provide more flexible and convenient payment options for everyone. 

Customers have are used to the experience they have with companies like PayPal, CashApp, Venmo, and Square, not to mention the money transfer capabilities that come with online portals set up by major banks. Customers and staff have come to expect more of their public sector interactions and resources. Some of these things include: 

• Instant posting to accounts, followed by immediate access to transaction information
• Flexible, convenient payment solutions that accept payments via a variety of methods and for a variety of obligations
• A branded workflow, hardware, and overall experience to reinforce that the customer is doing business directly with the organization builds further trust
• Centralized back office solution that allow staff to go to one place for all customer transaction data to better serve customers and resolve transaction discrepancies quickly
• Simplified reporting with a wide range of templates that come standard with the back office tool

Public sector engagement is a very personal interaction, which puts the onus on people-centric organizations to go the extra mile to deliver an excellent user experience. Introducing reliable tech and more efficient processes reminds customers that their local government or utility has their best interests at heart. Providing flexible, convenient, and versatile technology with greater capabilities and features builds further trust with customers. And with a fully personalized branded experience, customers can benefit from the new technology with the confidence that the payments they make and the business they do through those channels are connected directly to the organization.