Organisation: Ministry of Manpower

Client: In-house project

Country: Singapore

Overview: The project was undertaken by the Singapore Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM) Work Pass Integrated System Programme Office (WINS PO)

Challenge: MOM’s 18-year-old monolithic legacy employment pass IT systems had cumbersome customer and employee user experiences, which resulted in low customer satisfaction.

MOM sought to transform and modernize the legacy systems, to meet the demands of Singapore’s dynamic economy and labour market and reduce businesses’ costs in transacting with MOM.

Target Market: The employment pass digital services served businesses, ~412,000 work pass holders and MOM employees managing transactions across 12 work pass types. They also served to administer Singapore government agencies’ requirements in evaluating work pass applications.

Objectives: This project focuses on the design of the Work Pass Integrated Systems-Employment Pass (“WINS-EP”). MOM set out to create digital services that are resilient, adaptive and simple, and deliver a seamless customer experience.

Approach: WINS-EP was designed based on a human-centered approach, extensive service design and UX research, and a continuous feedback loop with customers.

Outcomes: Modernised and launched the full suite of application forms and modules for customers through anticipatory design, robust DesignOps and a reusable design system
Impact: Reduced customers’ time spent in filling forms by 40%, saving them 80,000 hours and SGD$2.5 million annually. With each release of new features, we continuously raised customer satisfaction ratings from 60% to over 95%. Over 4,000 customers rate the service monthly on a scale of 1-6, with >95% consistently rating it 5 or 6 upon 6 each month.

We successfully scaled the consistent use of MOM’s tone of voice to be clear, helpful, human and firm when required when conveying outcomes across ~1.5million transactions to customers annually. Our communications are now designed to provide assurance, transparency and clear feedback in follow-up steps to businesses and employment agencies and work pass applicants desiring to work in Singapore.

Our modernization journey nurtured and proliferated a user-centric mindset with the policy and operations departments across the organization, with employees requesting to participate in user research and hear directly from customers on their pain points and provide feedback on their proposed solutions. It has strengthened our capabilities in delivering user-centric services, and our experience serves as a foundation in our next phase of modernizing the legacy work permit digital services.