As Federal agencies are looking to improve customer experience (CX) across government, government officials at the Feb. 22 Digital Transformation Summit hosted by ACT-IAC and Carahsoft shared some of the ways they’re driving towards that goal, including through website modernization.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has been driving toward improved customer experience for some time now, and it recently updated its Medicare.gov website – which serves over 65 million Americans. Following the update, customer satisfaction with Medicare.gov increased from 56 percent to 72 percent in just one year – a 16 percent jump.
Although the Medicare.gov website has vastly improved, CMS is still looking to improve the Medicare enrollment process.
“We digitized a paper form,” Andrea Fletcher, the chief digital strategy officer at CMS, said, adding, “That was the last version of how we revamped, you know, did digital transformation. The next version is, ‘Do they even need to fill that form out? Do we already have their information and can we automatically enroll them?’”
“These are the kinds of questions that we’re asking now is like, ‘What does the user actually want?’ I probably won’t have to sign up. That’s my goal … it’s just all automatic for me,” Fletcher said.
Fletcher added that CMS is also looking to hire “a lot of young people,” especially digitally native Gen Z employees, to help drive its CX efforts.
“That’s the goal right now is how do we bring in the next generation of really great talent into the agency, and the people that we’re getting are phenomenal,” she said. “We’re getting top-notch data scientists coming in now, and so, we have to be ready for them.”
Similarly, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is going through its own website modernization. Beth Martin, the agency’s digital services expert, said that is one of OPM’s flagship CX efforts, “and we are working really hard to align that to our strategic goals.”
Martin is heavily involved in the OPM Digital Services Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA), which looks to update OPM.gov for the Federal workforce. However, when program officers are putting out a call on that order, she said OPM is working with them to make sure it’s the right fit.
“We make sure that they are aware of all of the components – we have about eight different areas that they can choose from, and they need to hit those milestones for their effort,” she explained.
“We need to make sure that this enterprise Digital Services BPA … is available and we are marketing it internally,” Martin added. “We’re also making sure that people are aware that we are really stressing the alignment to the strategic goals because we need to deliver on that modernization, and we can only do that if everybody is aware of what we’re trying to do and how important it is.”
