Citizens are the customers of public sector organisations. As consumers, they expect to have access to the brands they are buying from anytime, anywhere, and across a variety of channels, devices, and platforms. And providing that level of customer experience (CX) to help make a citizen’s journey to find the services they need as frictionless as possible should not be the preserve of consumer-facing organisations.
Indeed, citizens have deeper expectations, requirements and rights than typical everyday customers, so public sector organisations should be aiming to better engage with them as well as improve the experiences of the government employees providing public services.
Here’s how we’ve helped government bodies around the world to deliver the innovations their customers’ demand.
South Central Ambulance Service
South Central Ambulance Services (SCAS) NHS Foundation Trust is the 24/7 emergency ambulance service for over 7 million people living in the English counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Hampshire. SCAS employs over 2,000 specialist staff who handle over 500,000 urgent calls a year from its contact centres located across the region, as well as homeworkers.
SCAS required that both 999 emergency calls and 111 non-emergency calls could be handled through the same technical infrastructure and operational units. Skilled staff employed to answer the growing number of 111 calls needed to be able to rapidly reorient to handle any sudden incoming 999 calls if a large-scale incident or emergency occurred. The flexibility to support this blended role is only possible with very bespoke contact centre technology that enables contact centre managers and supervisors to react to changing situations easily and efficiently on the fly.
Because seconds count, SCAS offers a unique multi-disciplinary approach that can require multiple specialist medical experts to listen in to an emergency call to help speed up initial triage of a patient and determine the next steps e.g., dispatch an ambulance as soon as possible for critical cases. This way of working necessitated a bespoke solution, which Avaya partner, FourNet, a specialist in secure cloud, CX consulting and digital transformation in the public sector, was able to deliver via its experience with the Avaya ecosystem.
Chris Hayden, Telecoms Manager at SCAS, comments: “With help from FourNet and its partners, we ended-up with a solution that fulfils our needs and more. The management and team leaders now have much more control and visibility over their Agents than previously and they are now able to manage the various contact centre behaviours much more effectively.”
Leon County
In the US, working with Avaya, Leon County has been able to maintain the customer promise it takes so seriously: People Focused, Performance Driven. A long-time Avaya customer, the County embraced the cloud to improve citizen-facing services and lay a better foundation for growth and innovation.
Government departments recognise the need for flexible solutions that allow them to deploy “on the fly” to meet quick and changing circumstances. For Leon County, this meant everything from standing up new contact centres to field specific calls so that citizens can more quickly get the answers they need to working with the county’s emergency operations centre (EOC) during, for example, the pandemic and hurricane seasons.
Since modernising its system with Avaya, the county has been able to flexibly pivot as various situations arise. When the county instituted a fire services fee, it was able to quickly set up a contact centre dedicated to taking calls and questions from the public (why the county is implementing the fee, how it will affect the public, etc.). The county was able to tap existing workers across various offices to take these calls versus hiring new employees for a dedicated call centre, saving costs while delivering a better experience for citizens looking for specific answers and information.
With a more open, collaborative, and secure communications environment across its various departments, the county can now quickly adjust to keep pace with rapid changes and deliver better experiences – all while saving costs and improving productivity and availability.
DEWA
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has enhanced its Customer Care Centre to become an ‘Integrated Digital Interactive Hub’, enabling DEWA customers to access a wide range of services through an Interactive Voice System (IVR) that is empowered by AI and available around the clock.
Based on Avaya technology, DEWA’s Customer Care Centre was ranked among the top three Dubai government call centres in an assessment conducted by the Dubai Model Centre, which ranks local government departments based on the experiences they deliver.
DEWA’s Customer Care Centre enables customers to contact the organisation over various communication channels, including calls, email, video, or text chat. These multi-channel engagements are fully integrated to transition seamlessly from one medium to another. Additionally, a dynamic IVR provides self-service options, enabling customers to seamlessly apply for the services they need without agent involvement. A dynamic menu, powered by AI, identifies all registered callers and their information, and assigns the appropriate level of service to that customer based on their profile. It also provides call priority for special categories such as People of Determination and senior citizens.
A final word
Public sector organisations need to know that encouraging citizens to engage via digital channels and self-serve solutions can, and does, significantly impact the cost of engagement, so the benefit is to both the citizen who has more options to engage with their public services provider, and to the public sector organisation, which needs less resources/agents to fulfil those citizen requests. The final important point is that digital communications don’t have to require a disruptive ‘rip and replace’ approach. They can build on top of what already works, and innovate in the areas that matter the most, such as digital communications to improve the citizen experience.
Businesses are built by the experiences they provide, and every day, millions of those experiences are delivered by Avaya.
Organisations trust Avaya to provide innovative solutions for some of their most important ambitions and challenges, giving them the freedom to engage their customers and employees in ways that deliver the greatest business benefits.
Avaya contact centre and communications solutions power immersive, personalised, and unforgettable customer experiences that drive business momentum. With the freedom to choose their journey, there’s no limit to the experiences Avaya customers can create.
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