Public Sector CX Supercharged: 3 Ways to Improve Citizen Experiences

Public sector organizations do a lot to serve their communities.

They operate emergency response centers, provide education, manage social benefits, maintain infrastructure, deliver constituent services, and many more. Yet, for many citizens, their trust in local and federal government or their view on public sector services is based on their personal experiences of interacting with authorities.

That’s why public sector organizations should aim for elevated citizen services.

Besides pressure from your constituents, The Biden Administration’s President’s Management Agenda and Executive Order 14058 (Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government) has also increased focus on the digital experience.

As a result, U.S. government services are expected to emulate the progress seen in the private sector when engaging citizens.

Easy to say, hard to do?

Public sector organizations are in a tough position to keep up with increasing citizen interactions that take place in an expanding number of channels. While customers demand more intuitive, personalized, and faster services, organizations don’t have an increasing budget to innovate or hire more personnel.

As a result, there’s a gap between what organizations need to do and the resources they actually have available to meet citizen expectations. Verint calls this the Engagement Capacity Gap™.

How to bridge the Engagement Capacity Gap without increasing resources

Even if your organization had an unlimited budget for hiring new employees, adding more headcount wouldn’t be sustainable. Since the first wave of The Great Resignation, many of our customers have found it challenging to maintain their headcount to support their business.

But here are three ways that can help public sector organizations bridge the Engagement Capacity Gap:

1. Effectively deflect your high-volume, routine calls

Adopt a channel strategy that prioritizes, integrates, and optimizes customer interaction channels to meet citizens’ needs, while maximizing your efficiency. Enable self-service for the top, most important, high-volume request types and fully automate them.

Automation and an effective channel shift strategy can help you release resources from repetitive, mundane tasks and replace costly, human-assisted channels with cheaper ways of interaction. Analysts estimate that agent-assisted interactions cost about $6-12 per interaction, while automated self-service costs only a fraction of this price: approximately 25 cents per interaction.¹

To learn more about driving citizens to self-service channels, read this previous blog post.

2. Augment your human workforce with bots

AI-powered bots and CX Automation technologies are available to augment contact center roles such as agents, supervisors, managers, analysts, compliance teams and many more. These bots do not replace your human workforce—they help your employees do their jobs better and faster.

Specialized bots are capable of automating a single human function, thus reducing human effort. These bots are not intended to replace your employees: they’re trained to help humans at the right point in the workflow—without disrupting your existing processes.

By deploying the specialized bots offered by Verint, one of our public sector customers with a workforce of 2,000 agents, 250 supervisors, and average call duration of 8 minutes has achieved the following results:

• 60 seconds less after-call work after every call.
• 50% less time to evaluate compliance and agent skills.
• 30 seconds less spent on knowledge search or knowledge-related calls.
• An overall $15 million savings in less than 6 months.

To learn more about the team of specialized bots offered by Verint, please click here.

3. Turn your contact center data into actionable insights

While interacting with your citizens, you capture billions of unstructured, multimodal data. This is a treasure trove of behavioral data that can drive more informed decisions, improvements of your processes, and elevating your CX.

Yet, many organizations still don’t use this data because tapping into this vast amount of unstructured data is hard, expensive and requires too much time and effort.

The good news is technology can enable you to unlock the hidden value of your accumulated customer data—risk-free. To learn more about technologies that can help you turn multi-source, multi-modal data into actionable insights, click here.

Want to see how it works in real life?

Featuring Amazon Web Services, on June 12 Verint is hosting a complimentary, one-day event specifically tailored for public sector services providers. At this event you can:

• Hear proven best practices to improve CX and boost efficiency from public sector organizations such as the City of Tulsa.
• Participate in roundtable discussions with AWS and other industry experts and get new ideas about FedRAMP certification, data management, experience management, and applying emerging AI technologies.
• Discover how technology can help you improve employee training, contact center quality, and citizen experiences while boosting operational efficiencies.
• Seek guidance in calculating the expected ROI of your potential innovations.

Whether you’re from a city council, healthcare, public safety, insurance, education, or utilities organization, you’re more than welcome to join our experts on June 12 in Washington, D.C.

Learn more and save your spot today!

¹ What are the Benefits of a Self-Service Contact Centre?, CX Today, 2021