Faced with an uncertain economic climate, shrinking budgets and workforce attrition, government agencies are looking for new ways to implement efficient and innovative contact center technology solutions that do not disrupt service to the citizen. Contact centers are often the primary means of communication between an agency and its customers. They are also the perfect places to employ cost-effective cloud solutions that can scale and enable engagement with citizens in new and effective ways that forge relationships across the entire citizen experience.
To provide an exceptional customer experience, contact center professionals need to weave transactional moments into the fabric of ongoing constituent relationships. Those moments might include discovering why a person called, who they are, and how quickly an answer can be provided before moving on to the next call.
However, there are three challenges that government agencies must overcome to achieve true innovation, and to do that they will need technology that is agile, data-driven and secure:
1. Contact center professionals need to support customers on their terms and meet them where they are. Adding digital channels to voice calls allows customers to reach out to agencies through email, chat, or direct messages on social media. Their inquiry can then be routed to the appropriate resource based on their inquiry and contact method. The surface area where interactions with customers occur continues to grow, not just in contact centers but also in the commercial sector. Agencies need to be prepared to interact when and where their customers want to connect.
2. Agencies must weave expanding channels into an ongoing discussion with the customer at every checkpoint. Customers are not speaking with the same employee every time they connect with a contact center. Therefore, there is a need to continue the conversation where they last left off. Decision makers realize that if their agency has comprehensive information from previous calls or inquiries, no matter the contact method, they can better connect the customer with the right resource instead of putting them in a long queue to wait for service.
3. Agencies need experienced contact center staff during a time when the labor market is volatile. The most expensive part of the contact center is the human element. As agency contact centers move to a relationship model, the calls are lasting longer. The emphasis is now on solving issues on the first call rather than how long the call lasts, which was the former measure of productivity. This can have a cascading effect because with longer calls come longer queue wait times. At the same time, call lengths are growing 20 to 30 percent, but call center staff is not growing at those same levels. In fact, contact centers are losing staff. This only exacerbates the backlog of long wait times.
More Innovation, Less Disruption
Many cloud-based unified communications (UC) and contact center (CC) solutions come with disruptive benefits and are often destinations that agencies must adopt to get additive technology. For example, if an agency wants to add digital channels to their contact center, it is more likely they will have to move to a platform that might introduce disruption. Sometimes applications from the existing and new platforms might not be compatible.
Here is where meeting the customers where they are is so essential, whether they are on-premise, moving to the cloud or want some type of hybrid model. Agencies need an enterprise cloud for government that offers a complete UC and CC solution that is compliant with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) requirements. It also needs to be agile enough to build services upon it and capable of providing customer history and other data for more informed decision making. There is a real opportunity to redefine how customers consume government services.
The author, Jerry Dotson is Vice President of Public Sector at Avaya
