Region of Waterloo Improves Performance and Service Delivery with Verint
The Region of Waterloo is a two-tier government system that provides services to residents, including waste collection, public health, housing, employment, and income support
400,000 calls, requests, and interactions handled annually
Streamlined and automated service delivery
Implemented seamless integration with six different service departments
About The Region of Waterloo
The Region of Waterloo is a two-tier government system that provides services to residents, including waste collection, public health, housing, employment, and income support. The Region of Waterloo’s Service First Call Centre answers non-emergency calls related to citizen service.
Although these are non-emergency calls, they are extremely important to citizens and the Service First Call Centre. To respond in a timely manner and provide the best possible customer service, the region needed to ensure its contact center is adequately staffed and agents have the tools to work efficiently.
Region of Waterloo needed a comprehensive contact center solution to help manage communications, while providing detailed analysis of how agents could improve performance and, in turn, service delivery. Additionally, the solution had to support 24/7 self-service options for customers to further elevate citizen experience — all in an easy-to-use suite.
Solution: Verint’s customer engagement platform
To help manage communications more efficiently, ensure adequate staffing, and help agents improve their skills, Region of Waterloo chose Verint for its customer engagement platform, including Verint Quality Management, Verint Workforce Management, Verint Desktop and Process Analytics, and Verint Engagement Management Professional.
The Verint suite has become integral to the Service First Call Centre’s daily operations. Any communication with customers is through the Verint software, even when an agent isn’t on the line. For example, residents can now log service requests online during “off hours,” which compresses cycle time for the initiation of services.
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"It has been a great relationship with Verint. As our expectations have continued to grow, Verint has worked very closely with us to meet our needs."
Delivering exceptional service and a superior CX
Using Verint Workforce Management, the region can strategically align workforce capacity and call volumes, optimizing planning, forecasting, and scheduling. With Verint Quality Management and Verint Desktop and Process Analytics, the region is armed with critical information on service performance through recorded calls, agent scorecards, and other data. This insight is vital to support agent coaching and skills development for improved performance.
“The Verint platform enables managers and staff to see in real-time what they are dealing with and where they need to improve,” says Sheri Markle, Manager of the Service First Call Centre at Region of Waterloo. “That empowers better engagement between staff and residents and enables residents to receive the information they need in a timely and concise manner.”
Leveraging Verint Engagement Management Professional, the Service First Call Centre can take a more holistic approach to customer service by combining knowledge, process, data, and channels into a single, unified platform. In turn, this enables the region to deliver exceptional service and a superior experience to residents across their preferred channels of interaction.
Benefits: Self-service and quality management
With the Verint software, the region efficiently handles 400,000 calls, service requests, and citizen interactions annually for six different departments, each with numerous divisions. This includes more than 100 different case types, ranging from transit, housing, roads, and public health to employment support, waste collection, and provincial offenses/tickets. Residents now have many self-service options, which automate simple requests so that staff can concentrate on more complex interactions.
The Service First Call Centre has been able to ensure exceptional support and call coverage despite call volume increasing by 147 percent since the start of its operations in 2013.
“When setting up our call center, we knew we wanted to have a way to keep in touch with residents, ensure optimal service levels, and test scripts for our staff to ensure they had the proper information on hand,” explains Markle. “Verint Quality Management allowed us to easily monitor agent-resident phone interactions and, in turn, more effectively manage call handling. From there, we were able to establish benchmarks for the team.”
The region has maintained positive quality scores since the beginning. At the same time, it has been able to drill down to focus on specific call metrics when necessary to understand improvement opportunities in areas such as paraphrasing, listening, or validating residents’ inquiries.
Simplify, modernize and automate service options
Similar benefits and results have been seen across staff forecasting and scheduling as well. Prior to Verint, workforce management was non-existent in the Service First Call Centre. Staffing was done via a “best-guess approach” for call types and times of operation. Now, with Verint Workforce Management, the region has visibility into call volumes and historical data to optimize scheduling and call coverage.
“We are constantly looking to enhance service options, particularly through self-service, and Verint is a catalyst for much of our simplification, modernization, and automation efforts,” adds Markle. “We are working on an online process for residents to request general housing repairs and consider- ing other online processes to further streamline requests and expedite service delivery.”
Whereas users can sometimes be intimidated in learning how to juggle different options for the best outcomes, the Verint software is very user-friendly, Markle concludes. “It is simple for our residents and our staff to use. It is an easy tool that anyone can use to find the information they need. Furthermore, I feel like I have an ally with Verint.”
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