Governments and government agencies provide crucial services to their constituents, ensuring that day-to-day life in their jurisdiction carries on as smoothly as possible. Many government agencies and government programs rely on contact centers to serve their constituents, making customer service a high priority for the public sector.
Despite high expectations from the public as well as great importance in government call centers and the service they provide, governments often operate on a tight budget, making it difficult for government agencies to provide cutting-edge services while keeping up with the emergence of new mobile, digital channels.
To counter this, here are some of the technologies that State and Local governments need in their contact center platform.
Omnichannel Communications
Constituents want a seamless experience with their government agencies. Constituents are also making use of more emerging, mobile digital channels than ever before. Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile channel communication has skyrocketed as adoption of new digital channels has rapidly increased.
Constituents in the modern digital age want to connect with their local and state governments on channels like voice, email, live chat, chat bot, mobile apps, social media, and more. Supporting these channels, however, can often be expensive on a traditional, on-premise platform and the demands from constituents often exceed the resources allocated to the government.
Luckily, there is a solution for the cost and complexity of providing support over so many new, emerging digital channels to customers. A cloud-based, omnichannel platform is the perfect solution to allow citizens to communicate on any channel seamlessly while maintaining cost-effectiveness. An omnichannel solution allows your constituents to utilize any digital channels and switch between channels with ease during a conversation. Support channels like SMS/text messaging, mobile apps, messaging apps, chat, and more on top of traditional communication channels like voice and email.
During conversations, all digital channels are treated as one journey on an omnichannel platform, meaning the conversation can transfer between channels during the conversation and all interaction history and context is saved, allowing agents to easily track the conversation.
By being based on the cloud, more emerging channels can be added to the contact center repertoire with just a simple download, making upgrading and updating cheap and cost-effective.
Self-Service and Automation
Another issue that governments often have to deal with are repetitive tasks and repetitive issues. Tasks like paying bills and fines, filing complaints, reporting malfunctions or damage, and answering frequently asked questions are all tasks that, while still crucial, are often repetitive and can easily be automated. While the tasks may be easy, these repetitive tasks and questions, especially through 311 numbers, often take up lots of time and increase costs greatly.
One technology that government agency contact centers need to invest in is automation and self-service technology. Technology like standard IVR and more advanced conversational IVR powered by Natural Language Processing are all very useful tools that will help automate and reduce the number of repetitive tasks that public servants need to deal with. These self-service options also personalize the customer experience by allowing constituents to use their natural language to go through the self-service menu and select the right agency of their issues.
With the right platform, your agency can also easily set up automated business workflows and personalized journeys for constituents. For example, on the Bright Pattern platform, your agency can use customizable workflows and APIs within Bright Pattern’s Journey Builder to orchestrate the constituent’s journey step-by-step depending on how they navigate through the IVR. By automating repetitive tasks through the Journey Builder, you can ensure that your public servants can handle more important tasks and use their time more efficiently.
Integration With System of Records
Finally, another important task of the government agency contact center is to streamline how information is processed and utilized. Governments often have vast amounts of constituent information in their in-house record management system. This information can include things like phone numbers, caller IDs, addresses, personal information, and activity histories and records. Utilizing this information within the contact center platform can greatly boost agent performance and help personalize the constituent interaction.
Government agencies need a platform that can integrate their native, in-house record management system, and intelligently utilize this information to personalize the customer experience. For example, when a constituent goes through the IVR, the IVR can automatically create or update an existing case file in the system of records with any new customer information. Then, before the constituent connects with the agent, an agent can access the full summary of the constituent’s history, giving the agent the time to prepare for the interaction and understand what the customer’s issues are before the customer connects. This can help personalize the interaction while making the agent more efficient. Bright Pattern’s platform can integrate with any record management system, whether it’s a third-party CRM like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and Oracle Service Cloud, or an in-house, on-site record management system.
Bright Pattern for State and Local Government
Bright Pattern’s cloud-based contact center solution provides the advanced features that government agencies need at a fraction of the cost of other vendors. Deliver exceptional customer service without having to sacrifice on technology due to budget constraints. Bright Pattern supports features like omnichannel communication, accurate Conversational IVR, customizable self-service options, and AI-powered quality assurance, all of which will help your government call center close the technology gap between your agency and the constituents.
