Making it easier for exporters to find information

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote the first post on this blog about our approach to digital transformation in the Australian Trade and Investment Commission. Today, we’re going to talk about our first digital product, why we’ve chosen it, and how we’re delivering it.

There are lots of places you might go for help when you’re exporting. Austrade can help, and so can trade associations, State and Territory governments, and commercial entities like banks. We’re looking to work more closely with this network of organisations to offer services which join up across the different things a business needs to do.

Last year, we sent a team of user researchers across Australia and overseas, meeting with a wide range of businesses to understand their trade and investment needs. One of the consistent pain points in our research was information overload. Businesses feel like there’s too much information from many different places. This can be overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

To start addressing this need, we’re currently prototyping a digital service. It will help new or existing exporters to find the right information to make an export decision — regardless of whether that information is from Austrade or somewhere else.

We’ve given it a working title of the Export Support Finder, but this title might change as we iterate the product.

Here’s a look at the first version of the prototype, which we tested with businesses last week:

We’re starting by looking at the needs of businesses who trade in services, like architects and professional services companies. Even though many have overseas clients, we know that some of these businesses don’t identify as ‘exporters’.

Bringing together a team across Austrade

We’re following the Digital Transformation Agency’s service design and delivery process. Building on our discovery research completed last year, we’ve started with an alpha phase to prototype what the product could be. In the beta phase, we’ll release a working version live for businesses to try out and give feedback.

We’ve brought together a multi-disciplinary team to work on the product, which includes staff from our First Tier Services team who help businesses every day with export queries. We’re also working to co-design parts of the product with other organisations who help exporters.

This is the first digital service we’ve delivered at Austrade, so we’re expecting to learn a lot about how we might deliver services in the future. We’ll be sharing regular updates on this blog about our progress.

If your organisation works with exporters and you’d like to get involved, email the team at Export-Support-Finder-MDT@austrade.gov.au.

Jordan Hatch is the Deputy Chief Digital Officer at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission. Subscribe to the Austrade Digital blog to follow our work.