As the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign gets going, some of the candidates have already begun sharing their views on the state of healthcare in America. But looming over every mention of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the still-raw memory in the national psyche of one of the worst customer experience tragedies in recent history: October 2013’s disastrous botched rollout of the ACA registration site, Healthcare.gov.
For the U.S. politicians who opposed the legislation, which has become known as “Obamacare,” the broken website was yet another sign of the many failings of the President’s healthcare reform plan. To everyone else, the website’s failure had little to do with healthcare laws. It was simply more evidence that when it comes to being at the leading edge of the latest innovations in digital technology, the U.S. federal government—despite having more power and resources than any organization in the world—generally seems to be using an Internet from a long time ago and operating in a digital world far, far away.
U.S. Recruits Join the Digital Service
That the entire Healthcare.gov website project ended up costing $1.7 billion didn’t help to assuage any concerns of bureaucratic blundering, waste, and unnecessary complexity. But the president has taken some significant steps to change all of that.
The most dramatic move by the Obama Administration has been to hire a small army of Millennial coders and engineers to establish a “stealth startup” dedicated to overhauling the government’s aging IT systems.
The chosen tech talent—hand-picked and lured away from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google—has been recruited into an organization called the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), which is headquartered in a D.C. townhouse just a minute from the White House. This new organization, barely over a year old, adds youth, talent, and Silicon Valley firepower to the existing efforts of the American Council for Technology and the Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC). Since 2011, ACT-IAC has been working to overhaul IT across all federal agencies in order to implement President Obama’s Executive Order #13571, “Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service.” (You can read more about their work here.)
The goal of all of these efforts is to find new ways to leverage the Internet to create a better experience for the government’s primary customers: its citizens. As the USDS website puts it:
Every day, millions of people interact with the American government. We apply for Social Security benefits and small business loans. We look for affordable health insurance and financial aid. We need passports and tax refunds. Too often, these interactions can be frustrating and cumbersome because of outdated tools and unreliable systems. We believe that government is ready for a change.
And America’s government isn’t the only one waking up to the potential of the Internet to improve customer service and reboot democratic engagement for the twenty-first century.
Digital CX Improves Down Under
In January, perhaps following the model established by his U.S. counterpart, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who stepped down from his role as PM earlier this week, established a Digital Transformation Office (DTO) to reform the Commonwealth Government’s ability to serve its citizens online. The office of the PM’s official statement says:
People need to be able to transact services and access information anytime, anywhere. Like any other service industry, government should design its services in the most user friendly way. Interacting with government should be as easy as Internet banking or ordering a taxi through an app.
One of the DTO’s first tasks will be to ensure people no longer have to complete separate log on processes for each government service. Instead, people should have a ‘digital identity’, which they can use to log in to each of their services across the government.
It’s an ambitious vision to bring the latest customer journey management tools to bear on services that have traditionally involved long lines and hold times, and the Australian government’s commitment to the challenge bodes well for the future.
But there’s a smaller, more agile, tech-savvy country that’s moving faster than the U.S. and Australia in the arena of government CX.
Watson Starts Serving in Singapore
Last fall, the government of Singapore announced a partnership with IBM to become the first nation in the world to enlist Watson, IBM’s artificially intelligent cloud-based software, into official government service.
In the words of Lim Soo Hoon, a Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, as reported by Digital News Asia, “We hope the collaboration with IBM to tap on its leading Watson technology will bring about a transformative change in how the Government can better interact with citizens and address their needs.”
Using IBM’s natural-language-comprehending cognitive computer to streamline the way Singaporeans interact with government services is, perhaps, the capstone on Singapore’s 10-year “iN2015 Masterplan”—an ambitious vision, initiated in 2005, to become “#1 in the world in harnessing infocomm to add value to the economy and society.”
Whether the Watson experiment will actually work remains to be seen, but Singapore’s citizens are clearly not being neglected, and it’ll be fascinating to see where the government’s IT ambitions take customer service next.
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