The ATO wants to be your social media friend
It may be the government agency Australians love to hate, but the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is mapping out a strategy to use social media and related tools to build collaborative relationships that will help reshape its operations in a ratepayer-centric way.
This was the broad strategy recently outlined by Jane King, the organisation’s deputy commissioner, customer service and solutions, as she works to put a customer-friendly face on an organisation not traditionally known for its warm-and-fuzzy nature.
Impetus for the effort has been stepped up after analysis showed that most Australians were still primarily interacting with the ATO through conventional channels such as phone and postal mail. “This is a rather strange pattern when you consider the takeup of online generally,” King says. “We want to make being part of the system as easy as possible. We’re spending time understanding how people interact with the system, and how we can improve that.”
Community influence
Gaining this understanding has proved to be a major part of the ATO's focus – which has been developed through community consultation and, increasingly, through the use of social media.
“Where we want to shoot for is to have the community influencing design,” King says. “We have a good sense of the technology that is in existence to take engagement to a new level. And we don’t have to build beasts that take many years to deploy into the system. We have the opportunity to do small bits that are Web based, iterative processes – then getting that feedback and design advice."
Social media will provide the feedback channels necessary to build this sort of collaborative relationship with the ATO – and recent Twitter and Facebook excursions by the ATO have represented the first steps in this direction. King points to wildly successful viral campaigns by brands like Old Spice – which successfully courted online mindshare with a social-media onslaught that boosted Web traffic by 300% and sales by 27% – as an example of how companies can find out what their customers want, and cater for it.
Tapping into community collaboration to increase community engagement is more than a marketing exercise for King, however: it’s a mandate if the ATO wants to boost its standing amongst a general population that is increasingly determined to have government on its own terms. King refers to this phenomenon as the ‘virtual citizen’, adding that it is “a pretty scary thing to government”.
“We’re seeing citizens own their core systems,” she explains. “Things like Twitter, Facebook and even iPads have come together to provide a core delivery system that we can use. We’re talking about a whole new world here: government is now sitting in the role of co-producer rather than as a controller and keeper of all transactions and information. It’s a really big shift for government to think like that.”Employee engagement
Projects like the ATO’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) project, which standardises business information for effortless transfer between agencies, reflect the kind of future that King envisions: built around customers’ desire to have a more seamless experience across the whole of governemnt, SBR has grown out of customer feedback and grown into viable policy and technology systems. Yet new systems are only part of the equation: In building a customer-responsive culture, the ATO is also having to engage with its own employees on new levels. “That’s something that probably scares a lot of agencies,” King says. “Government is a very difficult, very formal people and we’re not social by nature. The current approach is a mix of channels; most of these channels sit separately and are managed separately. It wasn’t a particularly free-flowing process, and not a way in which the community are used to operating."
This sort of cultural change can be effected through formalisation of social-media codes of conduct and value systems to reflect the new standards of social media. “You need to think carefully about what you are doing while supporting your staff to understand what they should be doing in social media, as a staff member, and as a social person,” King says. “It’s quite hard to separate those.”
Although it’s still a long way from social- media ubiquity, King says the ATO’s early forays into the space have proved moderately successful and encouraging. Facebook friend numbers are growing “slowly” but Twitter has proved far more well-received, with over 8000 followers. Tapping into this network has become a core goal of King, who cautions that government bodies need to work with their constituents on levels that will likely be counterintuitive.
New information, new social
“You get a lot more information than you might normally get from a much broader group of the community than you normally deal with,” she says. “The aim is to influence, educate and engage with people as we go along.” Production of YouTube videos has proved particularly popular for the ATO, which has seen over 100,000 hits on its “very successful” videos, with how-to videos far outpacing informational videos. And as with all social media, the key to managing this sort of spike in visitor engagement is to ensure the agency’s customer-service capabilities are flexible enough to respond in the way that the customers want to interact.
“We’re talking social media so they may not engage normally, but they will engage through social media,” King explains. “They won’t hesitate to give instant feedback via Twitter or Facebook – and it’s a much bigger interaction. You may suddenly be getting 10-fold the volumes you would normally have expected through an engagement process.” As well as pushing its barrow into the social-media world, the ATO has been using the Verint call-recording and analytics tool that “gives us really good information about what our customers are actually saying and doing,” King says.
Paired with a better customer-authentication framework to help address and maintain authentication across the online world, King says the ATO – like other government agencies – has recognised the need to ride this wave well. “There are some very dramatic shifts coming forward, and you need to think about those in designing your strategy,” she says, pegging 2015 as the year that government bodies will pass the tipping point. “There is increased opportunity for the community to shape the design and the emerging options around ‘let’s talk about me’. But we need to think quite carefully about how we future-proof going forward.” – David Braue
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