ATO looks for its own digital experience platform

The Australian Taxation Office is set to bring all of its websites onto a single platform to give customers and staff a “next generational digital experience”.

The national revenue agency revealed plans for a digital experience platform (DXP) to support its customer-facing website and internal knowledge management platform in a request for tender.

“The intent of this project is to enable a shift from ATO internal and externally-facing sites managed in isolation of other digital tools and services to a next generational digital experience,” it said.

“This will create both a customer and ATO employee user experience that is personalised, innovative and flexible to meet evolving user expectations.”

Tender documents show ato.gov.au is the main public facing domain expected to be brought onto DXP, though other sites like abr.gov.au, sbr.gov.au and staff.ato.gov.au will also shift.

For customers, the platform will allow for an improved customer experience (CX), including “personalisation based on individual needs” across online channels.

“The DXP for providing content to external audiences will support the collection, management and publishing of digital content,” the ATO said.

Ato.gov.au currently handles 63 million end users each year, with average daily user sessions coming in at 444,360. On peak days, this climbs as high as 1.73 million sessions.

The ATO predicts that this will climb to 537,700 average daily user sessions and 2.1 million on peak days, meaning the DXP will “need to scale up” to meet this demand.

But some of the greatest benefits are expected to be felt internally, with the ATO saying the single enterprise solution will “significantly improve the experience” for its 16,000 “content users”.

It said the DXP will do this by “delivering better functionality, an interactive user interface and seamless access to relevant knowledge content regardless of business area”.

“The internal facing platform will deliver a single enterprise solution that enables ATO staff to access knowledge content for all client-based interactions,” tender documents state.

Knowledge content includes “procedures, job aids and guidance documents that support a range of work types”, including advice to clients through its contact centre and dispute resolution activities.

Allowing “business to manage the frontend of ATO websites” is also expected to free up “technical specialists to undertake more complex work”.

The platform is similarly expected to provide “opportunities to increase efficiency and integration of… frontend systems (paper and partially digital forms) with… backend systems and operations”.

The ATO expects the successful bidder to provide the software – ideally capable of being hosted on its private cloud environment, though it will also consider SaaS solutions – and training.

Future systems integration with existing customer-facing frontend services is also expected in the future, but does not form part of this tender.

Plans for the DXP come as Services Australia progressing with the whole-of-government digital experience platform (GOVDXP).

GOVDXP, which will eventually replace the existing myGov digital services platform, aims to give citizens a single, personalised view of all their actions with government.

Deloitte has been developing the platform over the past 18 months after securing an initial $1 million contract. The consultancy has since won contracts totalling more than $40 million.

Earlier this week, Adobe scored a $32 million contract to provide the “core CX technology” behind GOVDXP.