Multichannel Management in the Public Sector - A Literature Review

Recent years have seen the digitalization of government organizations, their internal work processes and interaction with citizens and businesses. The private sector’s successful utilization of digital communication channels and continuous austerity measures have created demands for the efficiency gains in the public sector as well. An important way government organizations seek to achieve this goal is by migrating citizens and businesses from traditional channels towards digital self-service channels. Although digital channels are widely adopted, the use of traditional channels remains high. While digitalization offers government organiza-tions opportunities for improving internal and external processes, it also presents strategic and tactical challenges to achieving these goals.
The multichannel management field (MCM) of e-government focuses on how government organizations can manage public service encounters that may span multiple channels and or-ganizations to improve efficiency and increase user satisfaction. MCM scholars collaborate with practitioners, conduct field experiments, and study government-to-citizen interaction in real-life settings. MCM studies have led to important empirical findings, theory building, and field-tested practical recommendations. In spite of such valuable contributions to both schol-ars and practitioners, there are no up-to-date, comprehensive literature reviews, which synthe-size the knowledge from the MCM literature.
We therefore present a systematic and comprehensive literature review of MCM in e-government. Our review follows established guidelines and covers three main areas. (1) We identify lead scholars and outlets, concepts analyzed, and the main methods and theoretical lenses applied. (2) We synthesize results and suggestions for future studies from the papers. (3) Finally, we identify knowledge gaps and propose research approaches to addressing these gaps.