Government call centers are often inundated with requests, making it difficult for live agents to respond to each one in a timely manner. In the case of the City of San José, long wait times resulted in diminished customer service coupled with increased customer frustration, challenges meeting the needs of non-English speaking individuals, and live agent response inefficiencies from dealing with the same requests over and over.
Google Cloud, SpringML, and Carahsoft hosted a webinar where attendees learned about SpringML's Contact Center AI (CCAI) capabilities and the Google Cloud CCAI solution that were deployed for the City of San José. With over 200,000 calls per year and a population where over half its residents speak a language other than English at home, the City of San José engaged the Google Fellowship team to understand how they could help residents with top requests, such as removing bulky items and abandoned vehicles from their streets. The outcome identified the city as a perfect candidate to implement a CCAI solution to help improve efficiency, enable digital equity, and create an overall better citizen experience for 311 services: by reducing the number of transfers and hold times, increasing resident accessibility to city services by offering easier to use multilingual options, and making this service accessible 24x7.
Attendees heard from Jerry Driessen, CTO of the City of San José, as he shares his experience with the implementation approach to modernize call center applications.
During this webinar, the following topics were covered:
- How to modernize the Call Center and 311 systems using AI-powered automated agents
- Design considerations for a better citizen experience
- How machine learning can be used to ease communication between non-English speaking residents and City staff
- How to successfully implement chatbots in order to reduce call volumes to live agents
- Lessons learned from the City of San José team following the project deployment