Public Administration is more efficient with Service Digitalisation

The heath emergency has also led the Public Administration to reorganise its services, accelerating its Digital Transformation processes to ensure that its services run smoothly with the utmost security. The City Council of Bari is the first in Italy to adopt a virtual solution that can manage citizens' requests remotely.

Public administration offices are found to be a place where there is major flow of citizens, which slows down the speed with which services can be provided. That's why a Virtual Helpdesk had to be introduced to enable citizens to access most city council services from their own home.

Thanks to this new application, internet can be used to manage council service bookings remotely, through voice calls and video calls (Voip), virtual assistants or on the pages of the City Council website. What's more, the ‘virtual queue’ is automated, with a mechanism that can differentiate between services already booked and requests that instead arrive in real time. The virtual information desk also enables citizens to exchange documents online with council workers using an audio/video system.

The service will soon be available using a special app for Android and IoS devices.

To promote and support the development of an all-round solution that would enable city councils to carry out their work securely, Exprivia and QuestIT, thanks toArtificial Intelligence, have implemented a technology capable of providing all citizens' services remotely, thus avoiding queues and gatherings of people.

In fact, by accessing the city council website, citizens can book the required services and ask for operator assistance, on voice or video, therefore creating an automated queue; the Virtual Helpdesk also offers the option of interacting with a virtual assistant and receiving or submitting any documents necessary for the required service. The Virtual Helpdesk is extremely customisable, enabling city councils to configure each helpdesk for a specific service and to track all the appointments made.

With its user-friendliness, the Virtual Helpdesk means city councils can avoid disruption even when council staff are unable to work from the office, as happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. It guarantees greater efficiency at the work place and aims to offer quick and simple responses to citizens' requests.

This new solution available to the PA is an important step forward in the country's digital transformation in terms of the dematerialisation of processes, speeding up operations and reducing distances while paying great attention to security”.