Digital public services are critical in 2022 and have been for the last few years. Customers’ expectations of digital services have grown as the private sector has increasingly adopted new technologies and offered faster, more convenient ways of doing business. 

This was already true before the pandemic, but Covid-19 has greatly increased people’s expectations of government services being offered digitally.

Our world is increasingly becoming digital, and the COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged people to communicate digitally more frequently than before. This is happening through video chats, online shopping, and the creation of virtual family gatherings and in many other ways.

Similarly, governmental services have begun using new formats in an attempt to be more transparent, efficient and accessible to citizens.

Have government institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean been able to cope with this ongoing challenge?

Access to government transactions

In Latin America, where access to government transactions varies significantly among countries and even among regions within those countries, governments have had to quickly adapt their operations to the crisis.

Many countries saw an increase in the use of digital channels to conduct transactions during the pandemic. Some countries’ citizens went from conducting few transactions online before the pandemic to conducting many during it.

As one would think, younger people and those with higher levels of education were more likely to use the internet at the time of the pandemic.

For instance, according to a recent report published by Inter-American Development Bank and authored by Benjamin Roseth, Angela Maria Reyes and Karla Yee Amezaga in Peru, the number of citizens who carried out these types of transactions grew from 28% to 61% during the pandemic. In Panama, the number of people using digital public services increased from 13% to 27%. 

However, despite the general increase in online transactions, some countries, such as Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Paraguay still had over half of their total transactions occurring in physical locations.

Even in Uruguay—the regional leader in digital government—44% of citizens carried out their last transaction in person. 

Nonetheless, experts believe that this could also be because the restrictions on movement were not as strict as they were in other countries.

Citizens experienced difficulties accessing public services

For the most part, people had a difficult time conducting government business during the epidemic. 

During that time, the amount of time it took to process a transaction increased while the number of exchanges with the governing entity soar.

In Ecuador, the average time to process a transaction jumped from 2.6 hours before the outbreak to 5.0 during it.

There was also a significant increase from 1.4 hours to 2.6 hours in Uruguay, and Argentina experienced the most significant increase in the number of interactions required from 2.9 to 5.0.

These results suggest that the shift toward the digital channel did not make transactions more efficient during the pandemic.

The future of digital services in Latin America

Before the pandemic, most citizens carried out their government transactions in person, even in countries with ample availability of online services. 

So, even with the government’s efforts to improve and increase the number of their digital services, people still prefer in-person transactions in Latin America. 

In almost all countries (the exceptions being Peru and Uruguay) more than 50% of those conducting transactions through the internet said that they would have preferred to do them in person. 

On the other hand, 27% of people who had conducted transactions digitally said that they would not use the internet again for this purpose.

What does this tell us?

This shows that the user experience is vital for sustainable demand and use of service transactions.

Moreover, one of the main issues in e-governance is the lack of timely information and limited or no information in some cases. 

The regulatory systems limit the smooth transition to an e-government system. It seems challenging to keep up with the changing inventions in software and hardware.

Digital transactions should be quick, intuitive, and accessible to all. Digitization alone is not enough—digitized services must also be easy to use. 

Many people have had complicated digital experiences, meaning that some people will avoid using the digital channel in the future. Those results send a clear message: usability needs to be improved.