Customer & Citizen Experience
Insights seen through customer & citizen experience, across every sector.
43 articles · Customer & Citizen Experience · page 2 of 3
Articles
Week of 19 June 2023
Why a stolen DMV file weakened identity checks at agencies that were never breached
The MOVEit hack exposed the license records of most drivers in two states, and license numbers and issue dates stopped being secrets. Every agency that used them to check who residents were online inherited the breach, whether or not it ran MOVEit.
Week of 1 May 2023
First Republic’s white-glove service had no answer for an uninsured balance
First Republic’s clients stayed loyal until one question took over: was money above the insurance limit safe? In a confidence crisis, good service comes down to three things most banks lacked: seeing each client’s insured position, changing it fast and saying something specific.
Week of 3 April 2023
Eligible but unreachable: Medicaid unwinding ran on contact data
With pandemic-era continuous coverage over, states had about a year to recheck Medicaid eligibility for tens of millions of people. Who kept coverage depended less on the rules than on data: renewing people automatically, reaching the rest and processing their replies.
Week of 27 February 2023
BetterHelp’s intake form was a privacy promise the ad stack broke
The FTC’s BetterHelp case involved a company outside HIPAA, yet it reached every health organization with a website or app. What patients are told at sign-up is a promise, and the tracking tools behind the page must be built to keep it.
Week of 19 September 2022
What a stolen license number proves, and what banks treated it as proving
The Optus breach put millions of driver’s license and passport numbers in criminals’ hands. Banks had treated those numbers as proof of identity when opening accounts, answering calls and keeping files. Each of those habits needed its own fix.
Week of 15 August 2022
Why the IRS’s ten-year budget needed a one-year payoff
The Inflation Reduction Act handed the IRS about 80 billion dollars over a decade, and opponents vowed to claw it back from day one. When long-term money can vanish, every year’s spending has to be worth having on its own.
Week of 11 July 2022
988 launched without 911’s plumbing: location, dispatch and a fee
In July 2022 the national crisis line got an easy three-digit number, 988, but none of the hidden machinery that makes 911 work. States inherited three gaps: no caller location, no settled way to send help, and no dedicated funding.
Week of 9 May 2022
Stable is a claim: what TerraUSD asked of bank front lines
Few banks held TerraUSD, yet its collapse still walked through their doors with their customers: scammers preying on the losses, disputes over transfers people had approved themselves, and real confusion about which products near a deposit were actually protected.
Week of 11 April 2022
Ninety days at a time: telehealth’s stack of temporary permissions
In April 2022, another 90-day renewal of the public health emergency kept telehealth running on borrowed time. Patients saw one service. Underneath, health systems had to manage separate permissions with different owners and end dates, and tell patients which one their visit relied on.
Week of 14 February 2022
In Ukraine’s bank DDoS, the rumor outran the outage
In February 2022, attackers knocked Ukrainian state banks offline for a few hours while fake texts claimed ATMs had failed. The outage was brief; the fear was the point. Staying available in a crisis includes what customers believe about their money.
Week of 31 January 2022
One door is not a service: the IRS selfie reversal
In February 2022 the IRS stepped back from making selfie verification mandatory. The reason matters to any public service: one way of proving identity, however good at stopping fraud, shuts out part of a population that includes almost everyone.
Week of 27 December 2021
Why good-faith estimates weighed most on the therapist’s office
From January 1, 2022, every state-licensed provider owed uninsured and self-pay patients a written price estimate before scheduled care. Hospitals had billing teams to absorb it. Therapists and small practices, where self-pay is common and treatment has no fixed end, mostly did not.
Week of 8 November 2021
Robinhood’s phone-call breach argues for support access sized to one customer
In November 2021, one phone call to one support employee gave an attacker reach into millions of Robinhood customer records. The fix lives in three places: the person on the phone, the tools on their screen, and what customers are taught to trust.
Week of 2 August 2021
The paper card that made Key to NYC’s digital pass work
New York City’s August 2021 vaccination requirement accepted slick digital passes and the humble paper CDC card alike. That paper fallback carried the program through patchy records and untrained door staff, and it is the design choice any agency issuing digital credentials should copy first.
Week of 12 July 2021
A permanent telehealth benefit with an in-person clock attached
Medicare’s July 2021 proposal made home telehealth for mental health the first permanent post-pandemic benefit. Its conditions turned continuity of care into a record-keeping task: where the patient is, how the visit happens, and when they were last seen in person.
Week of 5 July 2021
Why community banks’ open banking experience sat with their core vendors
The July 2021 competition order nudged the CFPB toward a rule on sharing bank data. For community banks and credit unions, the customer’s experience of that sharing was already shaped elsewhere: by core and digital banking vendors, in three moments they only partly controlled.
Week of 18 January 2021
Vaccine access hinged on open appointments nobody could see
Vaccine eligibility widened in January 2021 faster than states could show where doses were. Booking failed less because of web traffic than because of three ownership gaps: eligibility rules, appointments held in partners’ systems, and phone and community help treated as overflow.
Week of 21 December 2020
How the No Surprises Act turned a medical bill into four data handoffs
Written to protect patients from shock medical bills, the No Surprises Act made a patient’s financial experience depend on four handoffs of information between schedulers, billing systems, health plans and an arbitration portal, and on whoever owned each one.
Week of 7 December 2020
Patient access is won or lost at the records counter
HHS’s December 2020 plan to speed up patients’ access to their own records stalled. It still pinpointed where access breaks down: the response clock, the identity check and the delivery path. All three are operational, and none needed a final rule to fix.
Week of 17 August 2020
Why the Postal Service slowdown belonged on agency risk registers
The August 2020 mail slowdown was covered as an election story. For agencies that mail notices, payments and medicines, it revealed something less visible: a critical dependency with legal deadlines attached and nobody inside the agency watching it.