voice calls handled through call centers. Both of these ... Embrace cloud. A cloud-based contact center architecture ...
Engaged Citizens Connecting Citizens to Services: Roadmap to Engagement Transformation in Local Government
Connecting Citizens to Services: Roadmap to Engagement Transformation in Local Government In 2012, with Hurricane Irene bearing down on New York and New Jersey, state and local governments had to get the word out to citizens to abandon high risk areas. But how?
Chris Christie, the plain-spoken governor of New Jersey, took the direct route, tweeting ‘Get the hell off the beach’. Not prosaic, but it worked – people evacuated, ultimately saving lives. Across the Atlantic, facing extremely heavy snowfalls in 2013, the Sandwell local council in the UK used Facebook to keep its citizens informed about school closures and service disruptions. Sandwell’s citizens were thrilled: Sandwell’s Facebook page increased the number of ‘likes’ by a factor of 5 in just a few days. Down under, the Australian Federal Police are using social media to engage with citizens on important public safety and crime issues such as protecting minors
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from predators and uncovering police corruption. Isolated events? Hardly. And it isn’t just the developed world. Forbes recently anointed Brazil the social media capital of the world. These examples are part of a greater revolution in how local governments interact with its citizens. The question is, can local governments afford to make such a shift at a time when austerity programs are slashing budgets and rising populations demand more services? Actually, it is precisely this communications revolution that enables local governments to close the gap between lower budgets and rising service demands.
Communications at a crossroads Local government budgets have fallen in the past five years. Budgets in Germany, for example, are down 6.2 percent1, with similar drops across the EU, the Americas and around the world. At the same time, demand for local government services is up, as populations grow, get older, and unemployment rates remain high in many parts of the world. Soaring cost of transactions How can local governments cope with this crisis? Perhaps initiatives that reduce the cost of local government’s fixed assets such as buildings and communications infrastructure are a good place to start. Historically, citizen engagement has taken two key forms: face-to-face and voice calls handled through call centers. Both of these forms of engagement are expensive and inflexible, requiring large, dedicated staff. Alternative communication methods, such as web or social media, are much less expensive by comparison compared to face-to-face and traditional call centers that require large investments in physical facilities. The tyranny of fixed staffing and facilities costs Governments are often spread across multiple fixed sites. This is reflected in high fixed-asset cost for facilities, higher staffing costs and increased travel expense for staff to move from site to site for meetings. Traditional engagement methods are also hard to scale as they depend on planned staffing levels. Governments must overstaff to ensure adequate capacity during high load periods, or staff for normal loads and accept inadequate service during peak periods (such as disasters). Citizen satisfaction challenges Finally, there is the issue of citizen satisfaction. The world has fully
embraced social media. Researchers have found that citizens prefer live chat for obtaining services2 . Why? Because they get faster answers and it is more efficient 3. In another study,4 citizens were asked how they would prefer contacting ‘their local government agency to find out about refuse collection’. Between 2005 and 2012 preference for contact by traditional phone lines fell 22 percent whereas preference for email and website grew by 275 percent.
Much of this shift is driven by access to mobile communications devices. To put this in perspective, mobile devices connected to the Internet worldwide now outnumber the world’s population5. It is no wonder that citizens prefer to engage with their local government via websites, email, live chat and social media, all on the move. Pressure to reduce time spent on routine administrative activities As budgets have fallen, so has staffing levels. Yet demand for services have actually risen. This leads to pressure on remaining staff to reduce time spent on routine administrative tasks in order to increase the amount of citizen services they can provide. The road forward Falling budgets combined with rising demand for services mean local governments must find a way to do more with less. But how? Let’s examine how local governments can get started.
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Eurostat, Total Government Expenditure as percent of GDP
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eDigital’s Customer Service Benchmark
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Ofcom Adults Media Use and Attitudes Report, 2013
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eDigital’s Customer Service Benchmark
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AllTwitter, August 28, 2012
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Designing a more flexible engagement framework The traditional call center – housed in dedicated facilities and staffed with dedicated agents – suffers greatly from a lack of flexibility. Fixed costs for the facilities are high, agent workloads are difficult to scale in times of crisis, and resolving citizen issues is often slow because it takes time to route problems to the correct person. Designing a more flexible engagement framework saves money, increases scalability, decreases the time it takes to reach successful problem resolution and increases citizen satisfaction. Here are nine ways to make your contact center architecture more flexible. 1. Embrace cloud A cloud-based contact center architecture allows local government to size their platform for normal loads, but quickly scale in times of crisis. This saves money in the short-term, and vastly improves citizen satisfaction in times of crisis.
There are additional, more subtle advantages as well. Governments are freed from the need to physically house and manage the contact center infrastructure, further reducing costs. And adding new functionality is faster and easier. Finally, a cloud-based contact center provides the framework required to deploy a virtual workforce by providing a flexible, scalable infrastructure that is easy to deploy anywhere there is an Internet connection.
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2. Multi-channel communications As we’ve seen, citizens often prefer alternative modes of communication when engaging with their local government. Since traditional face-toface or voice calls are the most expensive way to engage citizens, using alternative modes reduces costs.
What alternative modes make the most sense? That depends on the subject matter, but options include live-agent chat, automated call back, Twitter, Xing, Tencent, Weibo or Facebook. Local government can integrate social media into their contact center which can route a citizen’s tweet to the best available agent. The agent can tweet back, increasing citizen satisfaction and, by avoiding a phone call, reduce costs. A real-world example of multi-channel communications is found in Calgary, Canada, where an app that facilitates engagement with the city’s Animal Services enables citizens to find out about adoptable dogs and cats and to answer basic pet ownership questions. Another example is the City of Riverside, California, which has a mobile 311 app that has reduced calls to their contact center by 20 percent (80,000 calls) per year. The app allows citizens to report potholes, graffiti or other problems. The citizens snap a photo, describe the issue and send the information to the city. The photo (as well as GPS location and time stamp) goes to the City’s 311 contact center and generates a service request.
3. Digital services There are many services that are best handled with no direct contact at all. Making an appointment, obtaining routine information (addresses, schedules) and paying fees are all good examples of tasks best handled in this manner.
Digital services can be augmented by a web-based Virtual Assistant that delivers intelligent, nuanced online responses to queries. The Virtual Assistant can sit ‘live’ on an existing website, providing an access point from where citizens and employees can receive instant, meaningful answers to their frequently asked questions and - where appropriate – help them navigate to relevant pages on your website. Virtual Assistants reduce contact center costs by deflecting queries that would otherwise have been directed to a live agent. For example, citizens can use the clickto-contact service from a government web page to let the contact center know the best time and method for a return contact. When contact is eventually made, the information about where the citizen was searching and what they were doing is captured, analyzed, and seamlessly passed to the agent. Another benefit of digital services is the ability to provide automated services 24x7. This increases citizen satisfaction while reducing staff workload, keeping labor costs down.
4. Integrate communications through flexible and intuitive desktop The communications platform of the future delivers a broad, rich set of functionality to the agent. Agents need a user friendly, intuitive way to integrate this functionality into a single desktop. Such a solution would pull all communication channels and government applications together in one unified view.
For example, in response to a citizen reporting their trash was not collected, agents could generate real-time work orders to garbage collectors in a nearby area directing them to fix the problem. This saves money by reducing the work required to generate the work order as well as efficiently tasking workers already in the field. It also improves citizen satisfaction. 5. Enable virtual workers With a flexible, scalable cloud-based architecture and the appropriate desktop and mobile apps you can empower any employee to be part of your response team, regardless of their physical location. All they need is an Internet connection and a compatible phone.
The keys are tools that seamlessly link remote workers into your communications fabric. Tools that allow remote workers to be able to control things like presence and which phone they want to be able to receive calls on and view call queues.
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Enabling virtual workers drives a wide array of benefits. First, by allowing a portion of your dedicated contact center staff to work from home you free up facilities costs. Second, virtual contact center staff are easier to scale up or down for peak loads. For example, let’s examine a case where the city needs a few extra operators for short periods of time (perhaps even just one hour). In a case like this it may not make sense for an operator to travel into work, whereas working from home might be possible. Another example would be a disaster, such as a flood, where contact center agents may not be able to get to the office. However, by making services remote, agents and supervisors can login in from home and take calls.
clerk in the tax department or a manager in the parks department. The traditional procedure is to promise to follow-up after the agent contacts the appropriate agent. Of course, if the expert needs more information, another round of calls ensues and costs go up while satisfaction plummets. By enabling all staff to be a part of the virtual contact center, the proper expert can participate more quickly – often on the very first contact – either because the agent was able to locate and link them in, or through the use of skills-based routing in conjunction with Interactive Voice Recognition functionality.
And, finally, there are the softer benefits of reducing carbon emissions, as well attracting and retaining staff that may otherwise leave.
This is clearly an idea whose time has come. According to a recent study, 40 percent of local government respondents in the UK, stated that flexible and remote working is a priority in their department.6 6. Skills-based routing First contact resolution is an extremely important metric for local government. Fixing a citizen’s problem quickly, without the need for follow-up calls, is less expensive and improves citizen satisfaction. But solving their problem often requires involvement from someone in your organization who is not a dedicated contact center agent – perhaps a
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Need reference … this is from a Civil Service World study done in association with Unify
For example, a citizen might send an email in their native language asking about an issue they have with their tax bill. The skills-based routing system could analyze the email by keyword spotting and route the request to the most appropriate (and available agent) with proficiency in their language as well as knowledge of tax services for resolution. 7. Outbound calling They say ‘a stitch in time saves nine’. The same thing can often apply to proactive automated outbound calls. For example, in advance of heavy rains local government can initiate a series of outbound calls to homeowners known to live near storm drains. A recorded message could remind them to call back if they see any debris blocking the storm drain, thus allowing crews to clear the debris ahead of the storm and avoid costly flooding.
9. Security By its very nature, citizen engagement with local governments requires strong security to protect both the citizen’s privacy as well as the government’s resources. Today that security layer is typically handled by live agents. Advanced communications technology can automate the process of proactive outbound calls (such as the example above), or reactive callbacks (in response to a citizen request from the web, mobile or even from an on-hold call queue). 8. Bring your own device (BYOD) There are billions of mobile devices now connected to the Internet. Most of your staff has their own personal mobile devices – probably a smartphone. With the right architecture, it is easy to harness these devices as part of the communications infrastructure. This saves both capital expense (the cost of the device) and operating expense (the cost of managing the device).
Second, BYOD allows government staff to access crucial information while still in the field, leading to faster problem resolution, higher efficiency and increased citizen satisfaction. And, finally, BYOD extends the reach of local governments, making staff accessible outside of the workplace. In times of crisis this can be especially valuable.
A more flexible architecture would offload much of that security. For example, an advanced speech recognition system can ask the caller a series of questions to verify identity and determine for which services the caller is authorized. The use of voice biometrics further streamlines the authentication process by eliminating the need for cumbersome authentication questions. A caller’s identity is established through a natural conversation which can be verified against an external database. As an added benefit, automated verification solutions can do double duty by directing a call to an operator or group of operators with the skills to manage the caller’s inquiry.
Conclusion It is a challenging time for local governments. They are being asked to reduce spending, increase service levels and engage with their citizens in new and more effective ways. By designing a more flexible Engagement framework, local governments can address all three needs simultaneously.
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The winter of 2014 was especially harsh for the United States
The European winter of 2014 was the wettest in recorded history,
with record cold and heavy snowfall. At one point 187 million people were under weather warnings or advisories. Northeastern states such as New York were especially hard hit.
causing severe flooding. In spite of widespread austerity measures, local governments had to provide emergency services to their citizens.
Local government agencies were left with the task of deploying and managing salt trucks to keep the roads open. Citizens frustrated and trying to get through their day, flooded local 311 call centers to report streets that were impassable and required salt trucks. This is a perfect example of the kind of situation local governments find themselves in today. Despite curtailed budgets, they face periodic spikes in demand and must respond quickly, yet with less expense. Using the principles outlined in this paper, a city would have the ability to check to see the current location of their salt truck fleet and immediately dispatch – perhaps via a mobile work order direct to the truck. In doing so, local government can lower their costs while increasing citizen satisfaction.
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Local councils had to get supplies and support to those affected quickly and also manage the after effects. Logistics were critical and timely coordination crucial. For example, councils were providing sandbags at specific depots and needed to communicate the particulars to citizens quickly and accurately. Not surprisingly, phone lines were extremely busy with citizens’ inquiries. In addition, many citizens turned to social media, such as Twitter to pose questions of local councils. Government staff found it difficult to establish flood advice lines on short notice. Exacerbating matters were calls that required escalation (on topics such as whether to switch off electricity or gas to homes). Using the principles outlined in this paper, a council which had enabled the Engaged Citizen could easily, quickly and accurately send proactive alerts via social media or outbound calling to residents within specific geographic areas. This would reduce costs by reducing calls into the call center, and increase citizen satisfaction through timely, proactive engagement.
About Unify Unify is one of the world’s leading communications software and services firms, providing integrated communications solutions for approximately 75 percent of the Fortune Global 500. Our solutions unify multiple networks, devices and applications into one easy-to-use platform that allows teams to engage in rich and meaningful conversations. The result is a transformation of how the enterprise communicates and collaborates that amplifies collective effort, energizes the business, and enhances business performance. Unify has a strong heritage of product reliability, innovation, open standards and security. unify.com
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