Easy Travel e-registration for Singaporeans Travelling Abroad
MFA encourages all Singapore travellers to e-register on their platform when they are making their travel plans. However, only a mere 7% of the travellers do so, citing reasons such as lack of awareness/motivation, complex registration process and lack of value-creation. Elderly travellers who are less tech-savvy are finding the current MFA e-platform challenging to use as well. Through this project, MFA hopes to encourage Singapore travellers to e-register before they travel, including the not-so-tech-savvy elderly segments, and identify current gaps and opportunities and improve on MFA’s public-facing platforms to deliver more robust, speedier and user-friendly consular services/information.
Drawing inspirations from other applications that utilises artificial intelligence and chatbots, student researchers and faculty worked with MFA mentors to devise a Digital Transformation strategy for their project challenge:
- Gain awareness/motivation via social media: Engaging social media content companies to raise awareness, clarify and dispel reservations related to privacy and security.
- Partnerships: Collaborating with other government agencies who have collected Singaporean travellers’ data previously for a more integrated platform and user experience.
- Streamlining processes via integration: (a) Integrating Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA), speech-to-speech translation and location-based technology into MFA’s platform for greater convenience to travellers ; (b) Utilising chatbots on different messenger apps such as Facebook, to handle general enquiries. This further allow consular officers to focus on more pressing issues during crises; (c) Reducing the steps in the e-registration process by integrating with existing government databases.
The class gave suggestions to MFA on speedier and streamlined process for Singaporean travellers. MFA saw a lot of potential in the students' recommendations, and may consider implementing some of their ideas in the future:
Students presented valuable insights and existing issues that MFA should tackle to enhance its existing consular services, especially on how to reach the elderly Singapore travellers who are not so advance and knowledgeable with technology.
A team of five students proposed and presented a Virtual Personal Assistant prototype to show how easy it is for Singaporean travellers to access and e-register with MFA before departing Singapore.
Another team of five students proposed and presented a chatbot prototype to showcase how it can address simple enquiries from family members in times of cirisis, so that MFA can effectively channel their resources into helping Singaporeans overseas.
Related media:
https://mediacast.smu.edu.sg/media/SMU+students+suggest+speedier+and+more+streamlined+processes+to+eRegister+with+MFA+before+departing+the+country/0_vlzemmww/44087142"
"We were glad to have an opportunity to work with MFA on one of their key business problem – to increase e-registration of Singaporeans before they travel overseas. The student teams were very creative with their solutions. Couple of teams proposed the use of AI technology – Virtual Personal Assistant (Amazon Alexa) and chatbot. This is to make e-registration as easy as possible especially for the senior citizens. These two teams even built a prototype each to show to the MFA judges which wowed all of us given that these AI technology were new in 2017. MFA was so impressed with the proposed solutions that they requested to have a joint news event with SMU – well done to the student teams!"
- Adjunct Faculty Wong Yuet Nan, School of Information Systems, SMU