How CMS Used Data to Enhance Citizen Experience

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has one of the biggest digital footprints in federal government, which means it isn’t simple to keep track of every customer experience. The agency has more than 50 million active users using its online services, including Medicare.gov, MyMedicare.gov, Medicaid.gov, InsureKidsNow.gov and HealthCare.gov.

Without a performance tracker, it was especially difficult for the agency to oversee its CX in real time. Often, the agency reactively addressed problems that cropped up in its web environment. CMS realized it needed greater visibility on a single portal to stop the fire drills.

Solution

So the agency partnered with New Relic to deploy a cloud software analytics platform. The platform provided a unified, intuitive “pane of glass” that granted performance visibility into all its online services, from the back end to the front end. The platform provided tools such as dashboards, alerting and transaction logs that extended visibility to all employees — developer and non-developer — so they could be more agile in their work.

Results

As a result, the agency was able to:

• Decrease response times to performance issues by at least 75%.
• Enhance customer experience by organizing, querying and visualizing data regarding key questions about application performance and CX.
• View and analyze massive amounts of data to gain actionable insights in real time.

Best Practices

Like CMS, your agency can kick-start better metrics to enhance CX by:

1. Establishing customer-focused KPIs that align with agency goals
2. Assessing the quality of your service through the customer’s eyes
3. Breaking down the established key performance indicators KPIs in to action items
4. Citizen-sourcing your data
5. Making data visible to internal stakeholders

Download our report, A Metrics-Driven Approach to Customer Experience, to learn how to carry out these five best practices, and more about how data-driven solutions can improve CX at your agency here.