The Social Security Administration (SSA) provides individuals and families with the documents and materials necessary for their well-being. The agency protects the elderly and people with disabilities against the expenses of illnesses that may otherwise use up their savings. It keeps families together and gives children the chance to grow up healthy and secure.
SSA does not operate without challenges. Every few months, the agency seems to make the news for its inadequate customer support. As one of our largest High Impact Service Providers (HISP), it is responsible for creating an environment that will provide a superior customer experience with exceptional employees in an innovative way. This is the challenge and vision for SSA. By 2025, SSA is to be focused on understanding the customer's experience over their lifetime. Through this understanding, they will respond to and anticipate their customers' needs, and thoughtfully craft appropriate service options.
SSA
Scaling Digital Transformation Through Customer Experience (CX)
So many strive to make a difference in one's life; your company has made a difference in millions of lives. Our agency would not be able to successfully transform the way we operate without your focus on delivering greater value to the American public and your expertise in customer experience and organizational change.
SSA, Senior Executive Service Employee (SES)
Case Study
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The maintenance costs for SSA’s legacy systems were growing at an unsustainable rate. The agency’s systems relied on over 50 million lines of legacy code and the employees who maintained this legacy code were approaching retirement age. The agency underwent multiple unsuccessful modernization attempts prior to 2017 and followed the waterfall approach to designing its IT systems which resulted in solutions that were unsustainable and did not meet customer needs. As a result, SSA ranked 15 out of 17 in Customer Experience among other large federal agencies.
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Our team partnered with the agency to support and design an improved way to deliver digital products to the American public. They helped design an agile product approach that focused on improving the customer experience. As a result of continuous improvement, product planning time was reduced from over 1 year to 2-3 weeks by September 2018. During the same timeframe, customer outcomes also improved. For example, in 2018 the agency listened to its customers and notified 67 million Americans of changes to their benefits via their preferred digital channels.
Our team also helped design, strategize, and implement over 60+ SSA products and customer experience artifacts for the agency –including the mySSA platform and the 2025 SSA Vision as two examples of the agency’s improvements efforts and future outlook.
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Our team worked with the agency to ensure the right measures were being tracked throughout its investment product process to provide taxpayer value. Prior to their partnership, the agency delivered 82% of projects on schedule. With their support, they helped the agency move to 90% in FY 2019. They also accelerated the growth of an agile, iterative methodology from 57% to 70%. Robyn and her team supported the agency in using existing data to understand customer needs and prioritize smaller chunks of high-value/high-impact software enabling rapid, valuable releases.