The Alcobendas City Council will improve the online services it provides to internet users after analyzing a study of residents' behavior when using electronic procedures, as part of its policy to improve the public services it provides to citizens.
To this end, the City Council and the company Brain Trust signed a collaboration agreement this morning whereby the latter will create a pilot study to measure the user experience with a specific procedure, namely the electronic application for a certificate of residence. Last year, the City Council processed some 150,000 in-person applications for this certificate, while only 1,605 were submitted online.
Alberto Abella, associate director of Brain Trust, emphasized that "we are specialists in customer experience and business engineering, and now we want to transfer this approach from the private sector to the public sector." Abella estimates that citizens could save around 95% of their time.
Following this study, the City Council will receive detailed information on the reasons for the limited use of this electronic service, the main reasons and barriers causing this low usage and, most importantly, an action plan to improve it and make this procedure much more widely used. "This agreement is very interesting because it results in an improvement in the quality of service and saves time for citizens, making their daily lives easier in their dealings with the City Council, and it also brings significant benefits for the City Council," said the mayor of Alcobendas, Ignacio García de Vinuesa.
Brain Trust Consulting is a company established in the Alcobendas industrial park with 13 years of experience. It has developed a methodology in the field of smart cities to improve public services, adapting and improving customer service procedures and user experiences. "It is not only necessary to sensorize the city, but also to understand citizens and transfer their proposals to public services," explained Alberto Abella. Brain Trust CS has more than a hundred employees, of whom around seventy work at the Alcobendas headquarters. It also has a presence in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Its Spanish clients include BBVA, Mutua Madrileña, Endesa, and Orange, and its foreign clients even include companies from the United States.
