Is there a soul out there who relishes calling the government to deal with an issue? Whether you have a question for the IRS, are trying to book a campsite in a national park, want to ask about your Social Security benefits or need to help a loved one get care at a Veterans Affairs hospital, you pick up the phone prepared for a long wait and potentially several calls to complete the task at hand. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In 2018, the Office of Management and Budget directed executive branch agencies to include consideration of citizen experience in their strategic decisions, culture and design of services. The private sector has long known that improving customer experience is crucial to success, but the government has lagged in this area and is only now beginning to prioritize this crucial component of efficiency and customer loyalty.
A key step to improving the customer experience in the phone channel is to first reduce friction resulting from the caller authentication process, which is often times the first barrier people meet when calling into an organization. Phone calls pose a challenge for government agencies because, like many large-scale commercial organizations, they often need to first accurately identify callers in order to provide assistance. That is the case if a citizen is calling the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for help with a Medicare claim, or a taxpayer is calling the IRS about their refund status. But too many federal agencies attempt to identify these callers using knowledge-based authentication. The extensive use of KBA as a single authentication factor needs to go the way of the dodo. It is both time-consuming and insecure. Identification questions are too easily answered by fraudsters. Between the sheer number of dat ..
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