Just Digital or Multi-Channel? The Preferences of E-Government Service Adoption by Citizens and Business Users

The digital world has entered governments and public sector institutions. In that context, public e-services have been gaining increasing importance in recent years. However, will everything end up being digital in the future? This article investigates the preferences of citizens and business users to adopt different public services electronically and via further offline channels. Data of 500 citizens and 500 companies were collected together with the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings indicate that citizens as well as business users ask for a multi-channel offering. They prefer to deliberately choose subjective suitable channels for different services. We furthermore observed a difference between companies from different industries as well as between small and medium-to-large companies, such as the latter ones having a stronger preference for online channels than small companies.