We all know what it's like to have a frustrating customer service experience – the sense of being stuck between a person who genuinely wants to help you and a system that simply won't let them. That experience, familiar to anyone who has navigated a broken process, is exactly what public services is working hard to get right.
Yet five years of data and 132,000 citizens surveyed through KPMG’s Citizen Experience Excellence report tell a sobering story: overall improvement in public sector citizen experience is just 3%. The case for change is clear, and there is increasing ambition across the public sector to act on it.
When Antonia Romeo took up post as cabinet secretary in February, she was unambiguous about what she expects of the civil service. Calling on officials to "lean into digital service transformation," she set out a vision of an institution that harnesses unprecedented technological change in the service of delivery and efficiency. And this, she told CSW, is not optional. "Innovating to deliver better public services isn't just a 'nice to have'," she said. "It's incumbent on us to take the whole public service into this new world."
This gets to the heart of what a recent Civil Service World webinar, hosted in partnership with KPMG, set out to explore. Incremental improvements within individual departments are not enough. To drive a real improvement in citizen experience, the whole system – the whole public sector – needs to shift.
What does the data tell us?
Five years of data. 132,000 citizens surveyed. And an overall improvement in public sector citizen experience of just 3%. This was the scene set by Jo Thomson, partner for customer transformation at KPMG, in her introduction to the findings from this year’s Citizen Experience Excellence Report. The report measures citizens’ experience of public services across six pillars: integrity, resolution, expectations, time and effort, personalisation, and empathy.
The scene laid out is one of effort without payoff. Public sector scores are 8% behind the UK average benchmark – that is across all sectors, including financial services, retail, and leisure. Transformation projects are underway across the public sector; however, citizens are not necessarily feeling them yet. “Our hypothesis about this year's research is that the data would suggest that citizens just aren't feeling the benefit yet of some of the good transformation work that we know is happening behind the scenes,” Thomson said.
To shift the dial, KPMG’s report suggests that the public sector needs to drive systemic change based on three principles, which citizens say they want from public services. They want to be remembered, recognised, and respected.
Remember me: the data silo problem
Of the people surveyed for this year’s CEE report, 42% reported that they were not remembered from previous interactions. And 39% said that services did not feel joined up.
Thomson set out what closing the gap could look like in practice. A caseworker being able to see a single view of a citizen’s history across an organisation, for example, income data from HMRC, along with carer information from DWP and health context from the NHS, all visible in one place. “The system shift that needs to happen is about breaking down data silos. Ensuring the data that we keep on our citizens is one single version of the truth,” Thomson said.
At the Home Office, that work is already underway. Priya Khullar, deputy director for customer voice in the department’s Customer Services Group, described a major customer relationship management system that is weeks away from going live. It will pull together contact centres, social media, correspondence, complaints, and MP enquiries into a single view of the citizen. “We have lots of data,” Khullar said. However, “It is sitting in various different systems that may not talk to each other. So, you do not get that 360 view of the citizen.”
In the NHS, the equivalent is the single patient record, announced as part of the government’s 10 Year Health Plan. Ayub Bhayat, director of data & analytics and deputy CDAO at NHS England, explained that the goal is beyond just merely connecting systems. “It is how you shift the dial on experience for both our staff and our patients,” he said.
The aim is not just to share records but to make them understandable, he continued, noting that some patients have recently started asking ChatGPT to explain the blood results they receive via the NHS App. “We should be doing that for our patients,” Bhayat said.
Recognise me: designing systems around people
The second theme addresses personalisation. In KPMG’s 2026 report, 33% of citizens said their individual needs are not considered, and this proportion is increasing year on year. This is more than simply about making a more convenient system; it is about services that acknowledge your circumstances and respond to them. The government’s Tell Us Once service illustrates what getting this right looks like: when someone dies, bereaved families can notify multiple departments and local government in a single interaction – not forcing them into painful repetition. It is an example of what is possible when services are designed around citizens rather than the system. “We should really be driving and designing services around citizen journeys, not organisational charts,” Thomson said.
Khullar described segmentation work at the Home Office that creates maps of different citizens across visa types, students, workers, permanent settlers, and entrepreneurs. Each group needs different documents and different support throughout their journey through the process. The mapping work helps to ensure their different journeys are improved, she explained, and the next step is connecting those journeys to be more seamless, and so that a person moving from visa to settlement to naturalisation to passport does not have to start the whole process over and over again each time.
She posed the question: “How do we make sure that they are linking and talking to each other and that information can flow seamlessly for the individual?” The longer-term ambition, she said, is a citizen account connected together through the GOV.UK One Login that connects services across departments, following citizens through life.
In the NHS, a key way to better consider citizens’ needs is through the shift towards neighbourhood care. Bhayat described this fundamental shift, which is set out in the NHS 10 Year Health Plan, as moving away from big buildings that people travel to, and instead creating accessible locations and services designed around communities. “The days of the big buildings where everybody walks into, known as our hospital today, are probably rightly numbered,” he said. “We have got to be considering accessible services for our population, serving them where they want to be served.”
As an example of how this can improve outcomes, he spoke about the COVID-19 vaccination programme. The programme used data to identify communities with lower uptake of the vaccine, and positioned vaccine clinics in pre-existing community hubs, like churches, mosques, and synagogues, where people in those communities were more likely to attend.
Respect me: getting it right the first time
The third theme is respect me; it means dignity, fairness, empathy, and valuing someone’s time. Some 36% of citizens said their issues were not resolved the first time around. Thomson explained that this means people are then having to interact with services repeatedly, which leaves citizens feeling frustrated – and drives up costs.
Another 36% said digital services are not yet simple or seamless. Thomson explained that there are a lot of people who want digital channels, “but they still feel a little bit clunky.” And she also made the case for AI making services more empathetic, noting that in people’s most difficult moments, like bereavement, an AI-supported system could automatically update changes and trigger a connection to a highly trained individual able to offer appropriate support. It is not just about departmental efficiency but about respecting someone’s time – especially in these difficult moments.
What does it take to shift the system?
So, if these are the three elements of a good service, and there are patches of change across the public sector, what would it take to really shift the system to transform citizen experience? Thomson set out eight elements needed to drive change: integrated data and systems, culture and capability transformation, cross-government collaboration, citizen-centricity across the entire journey, funding for outcomes, policy and digital working, system-wide infrastructure, and ethical and inclusive design. None of these are new ideas, she said, but the challenge is making conscious cross-sector decisions to act on all of them rather than as individual parts.
Khullar believed the hardest part to shift would be the culture. Moving on from a departmental lens to a citizen-focused lens is a big challenge: “You can have the best strategy, you can have the best technology, but at the end of the day, it is about bringing people with you.” She recalled her experience from the private sector. In the private sector, the feedback loop between poor customer experience and the commercial outcome is immediate, as it has a very obvious impact on profit and loss, whereas in the public sector, there is no immediate feedback loop.
Thomson agreed with that view and said there needs to be shared leadership accountability as a structural response. “Leaders get driven to fulfil the metrics or outcomes they are responsible for, but rarely is there a shared pot of accountability from an outcome point of view.” Her advice was to harness the good work of those closest to the service and listen to them.
Bhayat agreed with the need to listen to the frontline, and rounded off the webinar with an example from his own experience. The scheduling for theatres at a hospital was being run through Post-it notes, shared Excel files, and WhatsApp messages. His team developed an application with a clinician, improved it based on frontline feedback, and tested it at a second hospital and then went live. The outcome was an 8% increase in theatre utilisation and an extra 100,000 patients seen across the hospital.
“That is because it was built with the frontline,” he stated. “Not through slide decks and processes theoretically developed.”
Visit the KPMG website to learn more about the shift from digital delivery to system alignment, and access the Citizen Experience Excellence Report UK 2025/2026