Intelligent Independence Inspection Part 4: Streamlining the User Experience

Being audited because of a regulatory mandate is like a root canal from your dentist - it may be necessary, but it is not something that anyone desires. As business leaders, we should work to make the experience as pleasant for our organization as possible. As we have discussed over the past few blogs, we can protect data privacy and increase organizational cost efficiency. Can this process also help the partners and staff members that are impacted have a better experience?

People value their time as well as process clarity. Like cost efficiency, this process is time optimized for partners, managers, and other covered persons. We view that the entire process should be facilitated through a wizard approach, similar to what Intuit Turbo Tax has done for individual tax preparation in the United States. By doing so, we ask precisely what is needed from the user when it is needed. We do not waste their time through unnecessary questions – questions are conditional based on the answers they provide at each step.

The result is that users need to spend less time complying with the inspection policy, and they are stepped through the process in a transparent fashion. If additional information is needed, the process remains in the system instead of emails and phone calls.

Further, individuals value familiarity. No individual is audited every year, so they may not recall the process. Instead, our viewpoint is to bring them into a system that they know and understand – the personal independence system. By integrating these concepts and functions together, users view this as an extension of the familiar instead of odd and novel.

Finally, we believe that users should drive the interactions that they experience in applications. Most applications have been designed with functionality in mind. As leaders, we need to take a different view, replacing or renovating applications that may adequately function but were not designed with the user in mind. In a separate blog, we will describe user experience design further.

In summary, our vision not only helps the organization but also the users that are selected to be audited. Users spend less time with compliance so that they can be billable. We accomplish this through a user-centric interface that is familiar to them and is clear as to what is requested from them.