Social Security Administration Electronic Service Provision A Strategic Assessment (2007) / Chapter Skim
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2 Lessons from Electronic Services in Financial Institutions
2 Lessons from Electronic Services in Financial Institutions
Pages 32-53
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From page 32... ...
needs, and its operational characteristics are analogous to other organizations outside the federal government. This chapter explores that premise and seeks to identify ways in which these organizations and institutions outside the federal government are dealing with some of the challenges that currently face the SSA in the realm of electronic services.
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From page 33... ...
The financial services community has been one of the most aggressive and competitive in using IT and electronic commerce. While the SSA is, appropriately, neither as aggressive nor competitive, there are ways in which financial institutions are dealing with situations that are relevant for the SSA.
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From page 34... ...
These observations suggest that the experience, market research, and product-refinement knowledge accrued by these financial institutions during the past 15 years, as well as the set of practices and approaches to effective information- and service-delivery capabilities and customer service that they have developed, can be strongly relevant to the SSA. An examination of the commercial financial services industry offers relevant insights and lessons learned for effective electronic services.
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From page 35... ...
In addition, transaction and information services online have a significant cost benefit versus in-person or call-center alternatives. The public is becoming accustomed to gaining access to personal banking information through bank or brokerage Web sites that present a smooth, seamless interface to a wide range of related services.
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From page 36... ...
One important reason for this shift in delivery channels is that service providers generally find that online transactions are less costly than inperson or telephone transactions.3 This situation has changed significantly in the past 10 years, especially in the United States and to the advantage of online transactions.4 Also, the 24/7 availability of such services makes them particularly convenient for customers and other users; convenience builds customer satisfaction and loyalty, both to the institution and to the online service channel, making it even more attractive for the service providers. Modern retail and institutional businesses generally view customer satisfaction as a primary metric, along with cost.
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From page 37... ...
Routine banking transactions now increasingly occur online, leaving customer service representatives at call centers and branches to handle the more complex situations (and sales opportunities)
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From page 38... ...
Another type of aggregation service that is being adopted is Bill Presentment, which assembles and organizes incoming bills to make them ready for payment. Coupled with online bill payment, this service eliminates the round-trip first-class mail circuit of receiving a paper bill and paying it by paper check.
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From page 39... ...
While this report's focus is not on security per se, it is a critical component of any electronic services strategy, as the SSA is appropriately aware. As financial institutions deploy and advance their own security strategies, there will likely be lessons for the SSA and other government agencies in how those institutions proceed.
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From page 40... ...
to the Consumer" to address this issue.10 Relevance for the SSA Despite the SSA's early unsuccessful experience with making the Personal Earnings and Benefit Estimate Statement (PEBES, discussed briefly in Chapter 4) available online, if the SSA wishes to deliver stateof-the-practice electronic services, then online access to individuals' Social Security Statements of Earnings and other account information will be a required and basic function.
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From page 41... ...
Relevance for the SSA and Other Agencies Maintaining multiple channels for people to access services is important (apart from a very few online-only banks, financial services institutions maintain several use channels)
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From page 42... ...
(See Chapter 3 for more on technological considerations.) In general, the maintenance of multiple channels should not preclude the transformation needed to provide services comparable with those of a large-scale financial services institution -- such institutions maintain multiple channels themselves.
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From page 43... ...
Navigation and Simplicity Any effective financial services site will have uncluttered pages with clear emphasis on the most common and natural transaction at each step. Achieving effective simplicity can be a more subtle challenge than one might think at first.
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From page 44... ...
A navigational norm has emerged, consistent with many other commercial sites. If a single domain name serves multiple natural audiences, the navigation bar at the top allows users to indicate what type of customer they are and/or what services they are interested in (see the first two examples in Figure 2.1)
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From page 45... ...
It is particularly important to understand the primary modes of use represented by those who will visit this Web site and to design labels suited to those individuals: for example, "Newly Retired," "Checking Benefits," or "Are You Ready to Retire? "13 Accessibility All well-designed financial services sites are developed to be "accessible" to the visually impaired, in the technical sense of their information or content pages being W3C accessibility compliant14 and thus navigable by a screen reader (such as Job Access with Speech, or JAWS15)
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From page 46... ...
As more sophisticated electronic services are made available, maintaining accessibility will be important going forward, especially given the broad, diverse, and heterogeneous user base of the SSA. CuSTOMERS AND uSERS OF ONLINE SERvICES Over 90 percent of U.S.
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From page 47... ...
Looking ahead to the kinds of services that might be expected in the future, these same users might also value being able to understand their complete financial picture online if the financial services industry had the capacity to display information from the SSA as part of users' financial profiles without rekeying the data -- albeit such a service raises the usual privacy and security considerations. BuSINESS INCENTIvES FOR ONLINE SERvICES Banks and brokerages have made significant investments in developing their online service channels.
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From page 48... ...
One important observation is that the effectiveness of electronic services should be determined by measuring relatie overall satisfaction of the users of online services as compared with the satisfaction of the remaining population of individuals using phone or office interactions (as opposed to measuring "satisfaction with online service" by itself)
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From page 49... ...
For retail brokerages, as the bulk of their business has become e-business, virtually all of their marketing -- whether print, television, or online -- has placed their electronic services in the center of communications. For retail banks, marketing online services is one of the arrows in the communications quiver.
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From page 50... ...
In addition, careful consideration of demographics and of particular market segments that are using electronic services at a high rate might lead the SSA to consider marketing to those segments very aggressively. There may also be lessons in how other government agencies have reached out to particular customer segments (see the discussion of the Internal Revenue Service in Chapter 4)
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From page 51... ...
Because of the relatively higher customer satisfaction scores for electronic services compared with telephone and paper processes, it stands to reason that a satisfied user of one e-government service will be more likely to seek out similar services to avoid long phone queues or paper-based cycle times. Cost Trade-offs Marginal costs of online transactions are very close to zero, and in any case much lower than any other means of delivery such as in person or by telephone.
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From page 52... ...
For example, organizational roles have tended to evolve along the following lines: • Centralized e-group: Strategy development, funding, navigation and information architecture, content ownership assignment, look and feel, policy development and enforcement, business requirements, storyboarding, wireframing, page design, sometimes front-end development; • Marketing and communications functions: Content for the "About" section, sign-off on the overall look and feel to fit the brand architecture; • IT function: Infrastructure, back-end and middleware development, sometimes front-end development; and • Lines of business: Content, business requirements for transaction services jointly with the core group. Relevance for the SSA and Other Agencies The SSA's management and organizational structures for electronic services and e-government have not yet passed through the second phase described above.
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From page 53... ...
Incorporating these lessons will require a strategic focus on electronic information and service delivery, metrics-guided improvement, and process transformation. Finding: The experiences of large-scale financial institutions in transitioning to the provision of electronic services are instructive in considering the challenges faced by the SSA in formulating its medium- and long-term electronic services strategy.
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