Tag Archives: Genesys

The Best of What’s New in Government Customer Experience

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State and local governments faced a perfect storm of challenges at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic response is now driving a more serious commitment to usability, accessibility and equity of government digital services. City and county officials ranked improving constituent experience and engagement as a top priority, trailing only cybersecurity, in the Center for Digital Government’s (CDG) 2021 Digital Cities and Counties surveys. And states ranked expanding and improving access to services as their top priority in CDG’s most recent Digital States Survey conducted in late 2020. Learn how your agency or municipality can adapt to this new environment, including taking advantage of COVID relief funds, modernizing IT infrastructure and expanding broadband in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

 

Empathy Is Key to Exceptional Experience

“Migrating to cloud-based solutions should be a priority for organizations that are still using on-premises systems. As we’ve seen during the pandemic, cloud-native services let organizations respond, support remote work, scale and add new capabilities much more quickly during crisis situations. Gone are the days of hoping the next emergency doesn’t exceed your on-premises or hosted hardware’s capacity. AI and ML use cases will vary by organization, but the end goal is those who are able to use self-service can do so easily, those who opt out or have more complex needs can reach a representative, and representatives have the context they need to engage and resolve issues with empathy.”

Read more insights from Genesys’ Senior Solution Consultant for U.S. Public Sector, Christina Angel.

 

Digital Workflows That Empower Constituents

“Constituents are looking for a consumer-grade experience when they interact with their state and local governments. They expect government services to meet them where they are — meaning they want omni-channel 24/7 services in a seamless delivery format. They want answers in real time, as well as tools to help them find answers themselves. A great workflow allows rapid delivery of government services with intelligent case routing and automation. It reduces costs by enabling self-service, proactively answering common questions and providing automated service responses. Finally, it provides a single system of government engagement that supports digital transformation efforts to improve overall customer experience.”

Read more insights from ServiceNow’s Global Head of State, Local and Regional Government Solutions, Tom Yeatts, and CTO/Chief Architect of State and Local Government and Higher Education, Chris Dilley.

 

Modernizing Document Workflows to Improve Service and Equity

IIG GovTech January Embedded Image 2022“The resident experience has a number of components. The first is engagement. Experiences should be immersive and intuitive and on par with user experiences in private sector companies. The second element is efficiency. The experience on the backend should be as functional as it is beautiful, meaning it reduces errors, optimizes workflows, automates processes and quickly delivers tangible value for the agency. The third aspect is effectiveness. Agencies must be able to measure and evaluate, almost in real time, how effectively they are engaging users and realizing a return on investment, and then adjust accordingly. The final component is trust. Organizations must demonstrate that they can protect mission-critical workflows and satisfy rigorous government and industry standards.”

Read more insights from DocuSign’s Vice President and Global Head of Industries, Michael (MJ) Jackson.

 

Reinventing the Customer Journey

“It’s listening to people and the frontline employees who serve them. Designers and CX professionals cannot always sit down with customers, but reviewing data through the right platform can make them feel like they are. You need the right technology — including “listening” tools, predictive intelligence, analytics and full closed-loop actioning capabilities — to gain a holistic understanding of your residents’ experiences and take the right actions that drive meaningful impact. Don’t overlook employee experience. Engaged employees are 4.6 times more likely to be customer-centric compared to disengaged employees. Part of engagement is feeling heard and valued. Always-on collaboration tools, where employees can submit and comment on ideas and feedback related to the resident experience, put the people closest to residents at the heart of your CX program and help you build a more resident-centric culture.”

Read more insights from Qualtrics’ Government Industry Advisor, Jill Leyden.

 

Adapting to New Customer Behaviors and Expectations

“A digital experience platform is an integrated set of technologies that supports the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences. It supports modernization efforts by providing a broad set of solutions for engaging constituents online. The digital world offers many possible touchpoints for residents. Trying to independently solve for each desired touchpoint can lead to a scrambled web of conflicting technologies, but taking a tech-first monolithic approach will lead to disappointing engagement. A digital experience platform offers proven patterns for providing meaningful engagement, while also allowing flexibility to architect each touchpoint according to the organization’s preferences.”

Read more insights from Acquia’s Digital Transformation Leader for Public Sector, Joshua Smith.

 

Video Teleconferencing Puts Humans at the Center of Interactions

“We’re seeing a lot of success with court applications. One great example is the Texas judiciary, which announced in February 2021 that more than 2,000 state judges had hosted a combined total of more than one million virtual hearings via Zoom since the pandemic began in March 2020. We anticipate courts and justice systems will continue to leverage videoconferencing in lieu of, or in combination with, in-person hearings due to the benefits it brings to witnesses, judges, jurors and other participants. In the social work realm, video teleconferencing helps increase access and care between in-person visits.”

Read more insights from Zoom’s Head of U.S. State and Local Government, Jennifer Chang.

 

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these CX thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

The Best of What’s New In Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

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State and local governments are dramatically expanding their deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), moving the use of these technologies from theoretical to practical. More governments are using AI in the form of machine learning to scour system activity logs to detect suspicious behavior that may signal a cyberattack. Intelligent software can automate this task and perform it at a scale that’s difficult for humans to match. But although states and localities are moving rapidly to take advantage of AI and ML, the first wave of deployments often focused on individual programs or tasks: chatbots, for example, that answer questions about unemployment insurance claims or help utility customers restore service. Broader and deeper use of AI will require governments to rethink traditional data management policies and upskill IT teams. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in artificial intelligence and machine learning in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

 

From Call Center to ‘Experience’ Center

“Agent assistance is a great example of how AI can improve both the agent experience and the customer experience. An agent assistance solution detects keywords within a spoken or written dialogue, and then uses those keywords to automatically present helpful information to the agent. In the case of new hires or agents who lack subject expertise, this type of solution not only saves time. It provides “training wheels” for the agent until they’re up to speed. AI models like agent assistance can also learn from agent feedback. Agents basically agree or disagree with the information that the AI presents, which helps the AI solution continually refine what it provides based on the context.”

Read more insights from Genesys’s Principal Solution Consultant, Nathan Hamrick.

 

Why Wait? Simple Strategies Put AI and ML Within Reach

“You don’t have to be a data scientist or develop custom models to be effective. There are very good AI solutions that are purpose built for specific use cases and don’t require customization, such as our Vision AI. I would start there. A software engineer can do what’s needed, and the solution will likely address a lot of the organization’s needs. Over time, software engineers and others can expand their skillset to retrain custom models in lightweight ways for slightly different use cases the generalized AI doesn’t accommodate. For example, Google Cloud’s Auto-ML products can be used by non-data scientists to retrain our best-in-class AI models for more custom use cases. Just remember that the AI solution is only one part of a larger automated processing use case, and organizations need to plan for how AI is going to be incorporated into that bigger process, so it can be used efficiently.”

Read more insights from Google Cloud Public Sector’s Strategic Business Executive, Chris Haas.

 

Reducing Complexity and Preparing for Success

GovTech Oct AI ML Blog Embedded Image 2021“Zero trust security is becoming a common expectation for managing access. The basic concept is that the network should not assume any user is trustworthy — regardless of whether they’re outside the network or already in. Organizations using a zero trust approach implement access controls inside and outside the network. Another important tactic is to minimize the number of handoffs. In other words, simplify the network architecture. Nodes — and connections between those nodes — create complexity, and complexity leads to management challenges and greater risk.”

Read more insights from Cloudera’s Senior Manager of Professional Services Strategy, Timur Nersesov.

 

Building a Human-Centered Foundation for Advanced Analytics

“Organizations often struggle to advance because of legacy processes. It’s important to be open to new thinking and new methodologies to accelerate the maturation process. Many organizations also lack a solid grasp of their strengths and weaknesses regarding analytics. In addition, their processes may be hostage to legacy systems, data silos or poor alignment across enterprise teams. To address these issues, organizations often need to work first on breaking down traditional barriers between data scientists, IT, citizen data scientists, analysts and domain experts. One way to support this is via a unified, human-centered analytics platform. Such a platform augments human capability regardless of one’s technical acumen, which allows everyone to take advantage of geospatial, predictive and ML-based analytic capabilities to collaborate, innovate and solve problems.”

Read more insights from Alteryx’s Vice President of Sales for State and Local Government and Education, Chuck Ellstrom.

 

Getting the Most from a Next-Generation Contact Center Platform

“AI enables better automation that empowers both end customers and agents through high-quality self-service and agent assistance. Numerous studies have shown that citizens and customers alike prefer self-service channels. Intelligent automation can make those channels much more effective with AI-powered virtual assistants and agents — not just for informational requests, but also for more complex transactions like understanding eligibility or checking claim status. In addition, intelligent automation can help increase agent productivity through things like agent assistance and help new agents become effective faster, which ultimately results in a better citizen experience.”

Read more insights from Talkdesk’s Vice President of Industry and Strategy for Public Sector, John Bastin.

 

Reimagining Talent Management

“A single platform is uniquely able to provide deep insights at scale. When you can use AI on one side to rationalize job requirements and on the other side to create a capabilities matrix of individual job seekers, you create some very powerful outcomes. So, a talent intelligence platform really becomes foundational to enabling a number of use cases such as dramatically reducing the time to re-employment, minimizing underemployment and reimagining learning and apprenticeship opportunities. And because AI is self-learning, a talent intelligence platform means these outcomes continually improve over time.”

Read more insights from Eightfold AI’s Vice President of Applied AI & Public Sector, Dan Hopkins.

 

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these AI/ML thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

The Best of What’s New in Hybrid and Remote Work

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When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, agencies scrambled to expand secure connectivity and acquire mobile devices, but most state and local CIOs say their organizations transitioned relatively easily to working from home on an emergency basis. Now, with COVID-19 cases in the U.S. dropping dramatically and economies reopening, public agencies face a more complicated issue: figuring out where and how state and local government employees will work going forward. A 2020 CDG national survey found almost 75 percent of respondents anticipate hybrid work — where employees work from home at least on a part-time basis — will be their long-term model. The trend is particularly strong at the state level where just 16 percent of respondents anticipate returning to a fully in-person work environment. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in hybrid and remote work in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

 

Modernizing Contact Centers to Enable Remote Work

“To ensure callers have a secure, fluid and reliable customer experience, agencies must maintain diverse channels of communication. Another challenge is ensuring that contact center agents have secure and timely access to their agency’s database, intuitively orchestrated communications and sufficient bandwidth for reliable connectivity. Organizations also need to minimize the learning curve associated with introducing new endpoints such as Bluetooth-enabled headsets, softphones and web real-time communication (WebRTC), which eliminate the need for traditional desk phones and enable workers to use their laptop for voice or digital interactions.”

Read more insights from Genesys’s Senior Solutions Consultant, Ivory Dugar.

 

The Digital HQ: Flexible, Inclusive and Connected

“What we’ve seen over the past year hasn’t just been about working from home. It’s been working from home during a pandemic. As the pandemic has stretched into its second year, employees are feeling the strain. The data show that even though the work-from-home experience is better than working in the office full time, employee satisfaction with work-life balance has declined and stress and anxiety have increased. A contributing factor to that stress is the pressure to demonstrate productivity. A third of remote workers say they feel pressure to make sure their managers know that they’re working.”

Read more insights from Slack’s Future Forum Senior Relationship Manager, Dave Macnee, and Customer Success Leader for Public Sector, Kevin Carter.

 

IIG GovTech Blog Embedded Image 2021Giving Remote Workers Access to Resources They Need

“Centralized IT management and virtualization technology are critical to manage infrastructure and address changes quickly and at massive scale — whether that’s to patch a vulnerability across all user devices, upgrade applications or deploy additional computing resources. IT can make a change once via software and then distribute it to everyone’s device within minutes with minimal downtime. Software can monitor network traffic and resource utilization in aggregate and then automatically allocate resources as needed so organizations don’t have to invest in higher-performance user devices or purchase more hardware. In addition, organizations can isolate workloads and systems for security or other purposes, meaning multiple workloads and operating systems can run on the same device.”

Read more insights from NVIDIA’s Senior Manager of Public Sector, Chip Carr.

 

Managing Process and Cultural Change

“It’s projected that 30 to 35 percent of the public sector workforce will remain remote. A lot of these workers will probably be younger. To attract and engage the workforce of the future, you have to keep systems, processes and tools up to date. Younger people run their lives on their phone. If you expect them to submit to completely manual paper-driven processes, you’ll probably never get a chance to hire them, much less retain them. You also have to find out what they need to be successful in a remote environment; show them a path to promotion; and demonstrate that remote, hybrid and on-prem teams are aware of and understand their value to the organization.”

Read more insights from SAP Concur’s Senior Director of Public Sector, Jim McClurkin.

 

Navigating the New Frontier

“Having more flexibility and removing the location barrier opens up real opportunities, especially when it comes to competing for specialties like IT. Some states prohibit hiring out of state, but organizations can still widen the pool to include candidates beyond their local headquarters. They can recruit candidates who want to reside in areas with a lower cost of living or who don’t have the time to commute, for example. This flexibility also helps attract minorities and women, which in IT work, has been a real challenge.”

Read more insights from CDG Senior Fellow, Peter K. Anderson.

 

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these hybrid and remote work thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

Using Technology to Manage Vaccine Distribution

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State and local government agencies are struggling to meet the challenges of rolling out a nationwide vaccine. Millions of vaccines have already been given, but there are still many who have yet to get their first dose. And, as new strains emerge, new or updated vaccines may need to be administered. Government agencies must prepare for the future in addition to handling today’s challenges.

It’s not just a logistical problem of distribution, it’s also an information problem. Residents need questions answered. They need to know about eligibility and availability of appointments. They need to make appointments. And all of this information needs to be up-to-date in a fluid situation.

Many agencies are overwhelmed with requests for basic information about the vaccine or appointments. This is huge challenge for state and local governments, and some systems are failing under the weight of demand. Call volumes can overwhelm even the most prepared call centers, and many online systems aren’t built to handle the strain.

Genesys Vaccine Distribution Blog Embedded Image 2021Anxious residents make appointments with retail vendors as well as states. If a resident gets a retail appointment first, they usually won’t cancel the state appointment. Vaccines must be administered within four to six hours; numerous no-shows risk wasting vaccine. Vaccination capacity is not achieved if appointment times are left unfilled, and this has a negative impact on the whole process.

Improving the Customer Experience

Fortunately, the right technology not only helps supply information and coordinate appointments, but it can also free up staff for more critical tasks. With a customer experience solution, agencies can leverage AI, automation, and self-service across all contact channels. They can keep the community informed while allowing essential workers to focus on mission critical operations.

Reducing Interaction Volume: The most important task for government agencies is providing essential information to residents without overwhelming staff resources. Most residents don’t need to need to interact with a live agent—whose time is best spent handling the most difficult situations.

AI-powered voice and chat bots can remove the burden from human agents by promoting self-service options and automating answers to requests. Bots must be armed with information, including vaccine FAQs, the agency’s knowledge base, CDC information, etc. They must also escalate inquiries if necessary, seamlessly transitioning to human agents who have the information to pick up where the bot left off. With the right customer experience solution, residents easily find the information they need without long waits, freeing up the staff to focus on high value work.

Smarter Scheduling: A customer engagement solution can automate the handlings of appointment information, allowing automated scheduling and sending out appointment reminders through the resident’s channel of choice: email, phone, or text. By providing the option to cancel or reschedule with an appointment reminder, the system reduces the number of no-shows.

Scheduling Optimization: The right solution optimizes vaccine rates with proactive scheduling, automatically offering available time slots to residents on a waiting list. If a resident cancels an appointment, then someone on the waiting list will be automatically notified and given an opportunity to take the appointment so vaccines aren’t wasted.

Predictive Analytics: Self-service options can be enhanced with predictive analytics. The solution monitors every visitor’s website activity, noting which pages they visit and for how long. It can then offer to redirect them to another page or to self-serve options. The resident gets information or appointments without human intervention.

Proactive Engagement: Government agencies don’t have to wait for residents to call; many customer engagement solutions allow agencies to proactively reach out to residents. Likewise, the system can send notifications about unforeseen conditions like weather or a vaccine shortage so appointments can be rescheduled.

How the System Works

Below is a step-by-step description of how a good customer engagement solution would handle a specific customer.

Step 1. Mary hears that her county is administering vaccines. She calls the county health department to schedule an appointment and get answers to vaccine questions.

Step 2. Because of the high call volumes and resource constraints, Mary’s call is answered by a voice bot rather than a live person. The bot can be regularly updated to include new or region-specific information.

Step 3. The voice bot directs Mary to a website to register for an appointment, but when she visits the site there are no appointments available.

Step 4. When Mary visits a certain page, the solution’s predictive analytics are triggered.  A bot offers to redirect her to other self-serve options and asks if she has any questions. She asks if the vaccine contains eggs because she has an allergy. Using AI technology, the bot answers the question—without having to engage a human agent.

Step 5. Knowing there are no appointments available, the bot asks Mary if she would like to be notified when an appointment becomes available. She chooses that option and her preferred notification method.

Step 6. A few days later Mary receives a notification that a vaccine is available and a link for scheduling an appointment. Closer to her appointment time, proactive notifications provide appointment reminders, information about pre-vaccine prep, and a chance to cancel or reschedule.

Step 7. Mary gets her shot; her customer journey is complete.

 

View our webinar to learn more about how to inform your community and allow frontline workers to focus on vaccine administration and other mission-critical operations.

Best of What’s New in Legacy Modernization

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The pandemic changed the risk equation for state and local governments around technology upgrades. In the past, state and local government CIOs had created orderly multi-year plans to push toward modern technologies, carefully weighing numerous factors and often facing pushback from public officials who didn’t want to fund updates if the old systems were still chugging along. In 2021 – after a vast shift to remote work, the increase in user-friendly digital services, and the innumerable changes to individual agencies brought on by the coronavirus – the modernization of legacy technology is seen through a new lens. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in legacy modernization in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

 

Moving Modernization Forward in Spite of Disruption

“State and local CIOs are dealing with challenges that none of us ever thought they would have to face. The two most important things they can do are to drive automation and focus on hybrid cloud solutions. We all know the cloud is here to stay. We also know that legacy systems will take too long to migrate completely to the cloud. Embracing a hybrid cloud approach around modern solutions, where you can be partly on-prem as well as in the cloud, is going to help drive modernization and help systems become more effective more quickly. The second piece is automation. Automation has come a long way. It allows organizations to re-factor their workforce into their mission while automating simpler tasks. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are part of this and will become increasingly important as state and local leaders look to improve responsiveness and citizen engagement — both now and in the future.”

Read more insights Red Hat’s Vice President of State and Local Government and Education, Nancy Bohannan.

 

It All Starts with Collaboration

“A DevSecOps approach takes DevOps culture and methodologies and incorporates security from the very beginning. This brings enormous value to legacy modernization efforts. Many legacy systems were built using waterfall methodologies. That means they may not be regularly scanned for vulnerabilities or they were simply not built to handle modern scale. DevSecOps helps you avoid these issues. First, you will be more agile, as we’ve seen with DevOps. Second, you will build systems that are inherently more secure. Instead of thinking about security after a system is built and in production, you are doing so from day zero and doing so continuously even after you’ve “shipped” it. This is especially critical in cloud environments where shared resources and multi-tenancy are the norm rather than the exception.”

Read more insights from Atlassian’s State and Local Manager, Shayla Sander, and Solutions Engineer, Ken Urban.

 

IIG GovTech March Blog 2021 Embedded ImageFinding Opportunities for Modernization

“The pandemic pushed most organizations into firefighting mode. They don’t have the luxury of doing wholesale rewrites of legacy software, which often take years. At the same time, organizations need to make these systems more efficient in order to serve constituents and improve operations — especially during the pandemic. Instead of replacing systems, organizations are augmenting them by putting new technologies on the front end. These efforts solve some of the immediate problems; however, many legacy challenges remain because organizations just haven’t had time or resources to do the rewrites.”

Read more insights from Dell Technologies’ Chief Strategist and Innovation Officer, Tony Powell.

 

Contact Center Modernization: Raising the Bar on Customer Service

“Modernizing how you serve citizens should be a continuous process. Methods of communication change. Technology improves. A pandemic exposes weakness in an entire process. And all of these things must be addressed in the context of resource constraints. Organizations should look across their constituency and current platform and ask questions such as: Are we communicating effectively? Do we have the necessary tools to properly manage resources? Do we have a business continuity plan? Is owning and managing technology the best use of our resources? Regardless of the question, the key is to be proactive in your evaluations.”

Read more insights from Genesys’s Director of Solution Consulting for the North American Public Sector, Chad Cole.

 

4 Tips for Advancing IT Procurement

“Identifying and analyzing potential risks upfront can give jurisdictions more options to address urgent IT needs when a crisis hits, Paneque says. ‘Through a risk assessment you can delineate potential scenarios you might face in the future and where you can substantiate an emergency procurement to stabilize them,’ says Paneque. ‘Later, you can roll that approach into less urgent kinds of requirements that can either be sourced through existing contracts or with typical methods of procurement like an RFP.’”

Read more insights from former New York State Chief Procurement Officer, Sergio Paneque.

 

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these legacy modernization thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

Designing a Better Digital Experience

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The government’s ability to offer meaningful digital engagements has long trailed behind that of the private sector. In the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s “Federal Government Report 2019,” citizen satisfaction with federal services fell for the second consecutive year — to 68.1 on a 100-point scale. Despite this, lawmakers and agency leaders of all levels are making efforts to improve the digital experience for government customers. In a recent FCW survey, 61% of participants said their agencies have already begun modernizing websites, 58% are digitizing forms, 51% are implementing e-signatures and 26% have begun providing personalized content. Learn the latest insights from industry thought leaders in Digital Experience in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report. Continue reading →