Insights · Looking Back

Customer & Citizen Experience

The Looking Back articles seen through customer & citizen experience, across every sector, in order.

43 articles

March 2020

  1. Week of 23 March 2020

    Forbearance on request: what the CARES Act asked of loan servicers

    The CARES Act gave borrowers with federally backed mortgages forbearance on request and told lenders how to report accommodated accounts. Servicing built for case-by-case exceptions had to run intake, credit reporting and exit planning at volume, mostly from home.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

April 2020

  1. Week of 27 April 2020

    For many Medicare patients, telehealth meant a phone call

    CMS’s April 30, 2020, rule paid audio-only visits at levels comparable to office visits. For many older, rural and low-income patients the phone was the only telehealth that worked, so it needed its own workflow and controls.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

May 2020

  1. Week of 11 May 2020

    Every unemployment fraud control had a cost to real claimants

    In May 2020, federal warnings about organized fraud against state unemployment systems pushed agencies to add identity checks to overloaded services. Each control point, at application, before payment or after it, shifted cost onto legitimate claimants in a different way.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

August 2020

  1. Week of 17 August 2020

    Why the Postal Service slowdown belonged on agency risk registers

    The August 2020 mail controversy was covered as an election story. For agencies that send notices, payments and medications, it exposed a channel dependency with statutory deadlines attached and no owner inside the agency.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

December 2020

  1. Week of 7 December 2020

    Patient access is won or lost at the records counter

    HHS’s December 2020 proposal to speed up patient access to records stalled, but it named the three places access actually fails: the response clock, the identity check and the delivery path. All three are operational, and none needed a final rule.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

  2. Week of 21 December 2020

    How the No Surprises Act turned a medical bill into four data handoffs

    The No Surprises Act was written as consumer protection. In practice it made the patient’s financial experience depend on four handoffs between schedulers, billing systems, health plans and an arbitration portal, and on whoever owned each one.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

January 2021

  1. Week of 18 January 2021

    Vaccine access hinged on open appointments nobody could see

    In January 2021, vaccine eligibility widened faster than states could show where doses were. Scheduling failed less from web traffic than from three ownership gaps: eligibility rules, appointment inventory held by partners, and assisted channels treated as overflow.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

July 2021

  1. Week of 5 July 2021

    Why community banks’ open banking experience sat with their core vendors

    The July 2021 competition order pushed the CFPB toward a data access rule. For community banks and credit unions, the customer’s experience of sharing data was already being decided elsewhere: by core and digital banking vendors, in three moments the institution only partly controlled.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

  2. Week of 12 July 2021

    A permanent telehealth benefit with an in-person clock attached

    Medicare’s July 2021 fee schedule proposal made home telehealth for mental health the first permanent post-pandemic benefit. Its conditions turned continuity of care into a records problem: where the patient is, how the visit happens, and when they were last seen in person.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

August 2021

  1. 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 digital passes and the paper CDC card alike. That fallback carried the program through weak records and untrained verifiers, and it is the design choice agencies issuing digital credentials should copy first.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

November 2021

  1. Week of 8 November 2021

    Robinhood’s phone-call breach argues for support access sized to one customer

    In November 2021, one socially engineered support employee gave an attacker reach into millions of customer records at a retail brokerage. The fix sits in three places: the agent on the phone, the tools behind them, and what customers are taught to trust.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

December 2021

  1. 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 estimate before scheduled care. Hospitals had revenue cycle teams to absorb it. Therapists and small practices, where self-pay is common and treatment has no fixed end, did not.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

January 2022

  1. Week of 31 January 2022

    One door is not a service: the IRS selfie reversal

    The IRS backed away from mandatory selfie verification in February 2022 because a single proofing route, however strong against fraud, locks out part of a universal population. Agencies needed several routes to the same assurance level, measured by who fails.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

February 2022

  1. Week of 14 February 2022

    In Ukraine’s bank DDoS, the rumor outran the outage

    The February 2022 denial-of-service attacks on Ukrainian state banks caused short disruptions, paired with false texts saying ATMs had failed. A bank’s availability in a crisis includes what customers believe about their money, so communication and alternative channels belong in the resilience plan.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

April 2022

  1. Week of 11 April 2022

    Ninety days at a time: telehealth’s stack of temporary permissions

    Another 90-day renewal of the public health emergency in April 2022 kept telehealth running on permissions with different owners and end dates. Patients saw one service. Health systems had to manage each layer separately and show patients, at booking, which rule their visit relied on.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

May 2022

  1. Week of 9 May 2022

    Stable is a claim: what TerraUSD asked of bank front lines

    Few banks held TerraUSD, but its collapse reached them through customers: scams riding on the losses, disputes over transfers customers had authorized, and confusion about which products near a deposit were actually protected.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

July 2022

  1. Week of 11 July 2022

    988 launched without 911’s plumbing: location, dispatch and a fee

    The crisis line got a three-digit number in July 2022, but none of the infrastructure 911 spent decades acquiring. States inherited three gaps: no caller location, no settled way to send help, and no dedicated funding stream.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

August 2022

  1. Week of 15 August 2022

    Why the IRS’s ten-year budget needed a one-year payoff

    The Inflation Reduction Act gave the IRS about 80 billion dollars over a decade, and opponents promised to cut it from the first day. Multiyear money that can be reversed has to be spent in an order where every tranche stands on its own.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

September 2022

  1. Week of 19 September 2022

    What a stolen license number proves, and what banks treated it as proving

    The Optus breach put millions of identity document numbers in criminals’ hands. Banks had used those numbers as proof of identity at account opening, in the contact center and in their own files. Each use needed a different fix.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

February 2023

  1. Week of 27 February 2023

    BetterHelp’s intake form was a privacy promise the ad stack broke

    The FTC’s BetterHelp case concerned a company outside HIPAA, but it reached every health organization with a digital front door. What patients are told when they sign up is a commitment, and the measurement tools behind the page must be built to keep it.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

April 2023

  1. Week of 3 April 2023

    Eligible but unreachable: Medicaid unwinding ran on contact data

    When continuous enrollment ended, states had about a year to redetermine eligibility for tens of millions of people. Outcomes turned less on eligibility rules than on whether agencies could renew people from data they held, reach the rest, and process their replies.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

May 2023

  1. Week of 1 May 2023

    First Republic’s white-glove service had no answer for an uninsured balance

    First Republic’s clients were loyal until the question became whether money above the insurance limit was safe. In a confidence crisis, client experience means three capabilities most banks lacked: seeing each client’s insured position, changing it fast, and saying something specific.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

June 2023

  1. Week of 19 June 2023

    Why a stolen DMV file weakened identity checks at agencies that were never breached

    When MOVEit exposed the license records of most drivers in two states, license numbers and issue dates stopped being secrets. Every agency that used them to verify residents online inherited the breach, whether or not it ran MOVEit.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

July 2023

  1. Week of 10 July 2023

    HCA’s data on 11 million patients sat in an email-formatting store, outside the EHR’s controls

    HCA Healthcare’s 2023 breach came from storage used to format patient emails, not from clinical systems. Outreach data looks harmless one field at a time, but together it is protected health information and needs EHR-grade ownership, inventory and minimization.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

January 2024

  1. Week of 1 January 2024

    For FinCEN’s beneficial ownership launch, the hardest design problem was shrinking

    FinCEN opened beneficial ownership filing on January 1, 2024 to tens of millions of small companies while the law faced constitutional challenge. A public obligation at that scale has four design problems, and the last, how it narrows, is rarely planned.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

April 2024

  1. Week of 8 April 2024

    How the APRA draft moved privacy compliance to the customer’s side of the counter

    The American Privacy Rights Act draft never passed. Its distinctive features let individuals act directly, through requests, machine-readable opt-out signals and lawsuits. Those three channels, already arriving through state law, are where regulated organizations’ privacy programs are now judged.

    • Cross-sector
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

June 2024

  1. Week of 24 June 2024

    How polyfill.io slipped past hospital tag reviews that checked each script only once

    Hospital script reviews were built after 2022 to stop patient data leaving through tracking tags. Polyfill.io showed the opposite risk: approved code that changed after approval and sent patients elsewhere. Managing it takes checks on the source, the content and the response.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

July 2024

  1. Week of 8 July 2024

    A credit union’s promises in an outage are set by its architecture, years before the attack

    Patelco’s members met its ransomware attack as four questions: can I use my money, what happened to my data, how do I get back in, who pays. Each answer was largely fixed by design and policy choices made long before June 2024.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 6 min read

  2. Week of 29 July 2024

    Systems contained, data exposed: why Columbus’s reassurance outran its evidence

    Columbus could prove it had contained the attack on its systems. It could not yet prove what the stolen data held or whom it exposed. Each claim needs its own evidence, and borrowing from the first to answer the second costs trust.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

August 2024

  1. Week of 19 August 2024

    National Public Data turned the Social Security number into a lookup key

    Once a single broker dataset linked names, addresses, birth dates and Social Security numbers, those facts could still find a customer’s record but could no longer prove who was asking. Enrollment, recovery and high-risk changes each needed a different fix.

    • Cross-sector
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

October 2024

  1. Week of 7 October 2024

    At American Water, containment was the part customers saw

    The largest U.S. water utility kept water flowing after a cyberattack, but switching off its billing portal was the incident as the public experienced it. For utilities and agencies, the customer-facing response is four decisions, and most can be made in advance.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

  2. Week of 28 October 2024

    Telehealth’s three policy clocks all ran down in December, so virtual care needed an annual cycle

    After the 2025 fee schedule, a Medicare virtual visit still depended on CMS rulemaking, a congressional extension and a DEA rule. What had looked like a post-emergency transition was a standing condition, with all three clocks converging at year-end, best run as a yearly cycle.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

February 2025

  1. Week of 10 February 2025

    With the CFPB paused, banks lost the outside signals their customer programs relied on

    The February 2025 stop-work order did not change consumer law. It removed three things the Bureau had supplied to firms almost for free: exam deadlines that forced fixes, published findings about peers, and federal follow-up on complaints. Firms had to replace each themselves.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

April 2025

  1. Week of 28 April 2025

    Iberia’s blackout put payment resilience back at the shop counter

    When the Iberian grid failed in April 2025, bank systems largely held and customers still could not pay. Payment resilience is set at the terminal, the network link, the offline rules and the cash fallback, and banks can shape all four.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

May 2025

  1. Week of 19 May 2025

    The scammers’ window: patient communication when a hospital goes dark

    Within days of Kettering Health’s May 2025 ransomware outage, criminals were phoning its patients for card payments. Outage communication is a security control, and it has to exist before the attack: surviving channels, ready answers, anti-impersonation rules and clear authority.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

July 2025

  1. Week of 28 July 2025

    Why the CMS patient app pledge depends on the registration desk

    The July 2025 health tech ecosystem pledge promised patients their records in apps of their choice. The data pipes largely existed. What decides success is front-office work: proving who the patient is, matching the right records, and handling consent and proxies.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

November 2025

  1. Week of 3 November 2025

    For SNAP systems, paying less was harder than paying nothing

    During the 2025 shutdown, court orders pushed states toward partial and then full November SNAP payments within days. Eligibility logic, EBT issuance and public communication were each built for benefits paid in full or not at all.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

January 2026

  1. Week of 12 January 2026

    Patient-directed AI: where HIPAA ends, a provider’s duties change shape

    When consumer AI products invited patients to connect their medical records, HIPAA protection ended at the patient’s request. Providers could not block that flow, but they still owed patients a safe pathway, a clean record and accurate context.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

  2. Week of 19 January 2026

    The easiest part of a card rate cap is cutting the rate

    The proposed 10% cap on credit card interest had no legal mechanism, and January 20 passed without one. For issuers, the episode showed that the customer and compliance risk of any cap lies in the offsetting changes, not in the rate itself.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

April 2026

  1. Week of 20 April 2026

    DOJ’s accessibility delay moved one date and put the budget at risk

    The one-year delay of the ADA Title II web rule left the standard, the underlying duty and residents’ experience where they were. Its sharpest effect was on budgets that had used April 2026 to justify the work.

    • Government
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

May 2026

  1. Week of 4 May 2026

    Why a hospital’s accessibility deadline now sits in its vendor contracts

    HHS gave hospitals and other funded providers another year to make websites and apps accessible under Section 504. Because most of what patients use online is built or run by vendors, the year is best spent on contracts.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

June 2026

  1. Week of 22 June 2026

    Why Europe’s accessibility law turns every bank release into evidence

    A year after the European Accessibility Act began to apply, banks serving EU consumers have learned that conformance decays with every release, template change and vendor update. The durable answer is a running body of evidence across four parts of the service.

    • Financial Services
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read

August 2026

  1. Week of 24 August 2026

    Health systems inherit the patients that IAL2 proofing turns away

    A year after NIST’s identity rewrite and CMS’s interoperability pledge, verified credentials were starting to open patient records across networks. Patients who cannot obtain one still depend on their health system, which needs designed routes for in-house proofing and vouching.

    • Healthcare
    • Customer & Citizen Experience
    • 5 min read