Establishing trust is the first step toward helping constituents achieve their goals. Without it, users may be reluctant to engage with public sector services—leading to real and potentially detrimental impacts on their lives.
A consistent approach to data security, best practices, and the right tooling provides the foundation needed to build and maintain trust. Public sector organizations handle their users’ most sensitive information—including medical histories, Social Security numbers, and personally identifiable information (PII). Constituents must be confident their trust will not be misplaced in order to fully utilize available services.
Automated tools offer critical support to ensure a secure, efficient digital environment.
Here are five ways public sector organizations can leverage strategic automation to build trust and deliver a better constituent experience.
1. Scan for Adherence to Internal Policies
Data security is only possible with consistent actions across your organization. We’ve seen examples of seemingly simple misconfigurations having drastic consequences in the public sector.
A misconfiguration in Salesforce Community websites led to the leak of private information across organizations such as the State of Vermont, TCF Bank, Washington DC Health, and more.
Leveraging an internal scanner like AutoRABIT Guard ensures proper settings are maintained for critical considerations.
Minimizing the opportunities for costly mistakes by ensuring proper permission and profile settings across your organization supports user trust. Constituents are going to be more comfortable utilizing your services when they know their sensitive data is being proactively protected with proper settings and behaviors.
2. Ensure Clean Code
The code that makes up your applications and updates has a direct relationship to the experience of the end user. Faulty code leads to misfires and malfunctions which are very frustrating when a constituent is trying to use your services.
Organizations in the public sector provide critical services. There is no room for errors that delay or accidentally deny these services to their users.
Even the most talented developers are bound to make a mistake. Static code analysis gives your developers the support they need to consistently produce flawless code that adheres to internal standards.
Expediting release cycles by eliminating manual code reviews increases the reliability of your applications and updates. Your constituents learn to rely on your services because they know the functionality will be there when they need it.
3. Maintain Contemporary Backups
Nothing destroys the customer experience like losing access to your platform altogether. And if you don’t have a contemporary data backup on hand, and the ability to quickly restore this backed up data, going dark is a very real possibility.
Anything from a targeted cyberattack to a simple error by a well-meaning team member has the potential to lead to data loss. And if that data loss is widespread, it can knock your system out of operation.
Loss of consumer trust and compliance failures are inevitable repercussions of this type of loss. Organizations in the public sector need to automate backup snapshots with a dedicated backup tool to ensure their data is there when they need it.
Constituents need reliability from their public sector services. A strong backup and recovery strategy is critical to accomplishing this.
4. Streamline Deployments with CI/CD
The public sector needs to be flexible. Needs change, new services are required, and these updates need to maintain high levels of quality and security. We’ve seen what happens when the public sector is forced to rush new digital offerings without taking the proper precautions.
Automating quality checks and deployment processes helps organizations be more agile in their responses to emerging constituent needs.
CI/CD tools provide critical support that expedites releases while ensuring reliability and security are not sacrificed. Automating manual processes maximizes efficiency in the DevOps pipeline, speeding release cycles and increasing yearly potential for release velocity.
Users can expect security patches, bug fixes, and smooth functionality in the digital interface when your DevOps pipeline is optimized with automated tools.
5. Keep Lines of Communication Open
Automation strengthens internal operations—but public trust also depends on human communication.
Transparency is key to building trust. This needs to move in two directions for organizations in the public sector—to your team and to your users.
User feedback is key to ensuring you are providing services that actually provide benefits. This can relate to refining current offerings for developing new services altogether. Customer experience should drive your decision-making when it comes to the services you offer.
Opening up internal communication facilitates the introduction of new ideas. Fresh perspectives reveal new ways to approach challenges. The public sector is always evolving—so must your approach.
Trust is critical to a positive customer experience. You can’t have one without the other. Automation is a non-negatable part of maintaining a trustworthy digital landscape which in turn supports a healthy and beneficial user experience.
Schedule a demo today to see exactly how AutoRABIT can help you achieve your goals.