Abstract
This chapter on face-to-face public service is the first of five chapters focused on a chosen medium of a public encounter. This chapter considers two issues: First, how is face to face work currently being articulated within the range of frontline public services? Second, what technologies are being offered and what problems with face-to-face work are they seeking to address. It considers academic and grey literature from a range of service domains to examine discourses of face-to-face work. The second section considers a range of technologies being deployed in face-to-face work, illustrated with examples. Third, the chapter offers a case of how frontline work is being organised in a British customer service centre. The chapter concludes that there are concerted attempts across public service to eradicate what are seen as avoidable public encounters. Where public encounters do remain, every effort is made to use digital technology to structure, record and monitor them. The resulting electronic data not only appeals to those responsible for performance management, but also helps to train emergent AI-based agents, through a better understanding of the behaviour of both customers and public servants.
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Jeffares, S. (2021). Position Closed: The Disappearance and Datafication of Face-to-Face Public Service. In: The Virtual Public Servant. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54084-5_4
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