A modern cloud-based contact center can drive excellent service experiences for citizens

Maintaining citizens’ trust in their government’s ability to serve them is priceless. Public sector organizations can help sustain that trust by delivering excellent service through optimized communication channels, self-serve and agent-assist technologies, and data-driven personalization. This paper serves as a thought catalyst for public agencies looking to modernize their contact center experience.

Contact centers: A vital link to citizens

Public sector contact centers serve as a vital link between government agencies and citizens. Often serving as the government’s first and primary point of interaction with the public, contact centers facilitate two-way communication, allowing citizens to access information, ask questions and voice concerns. At the same time, contact center interactions provide the government with a wealth of data that, when used effectively, has the potential to provide valuable insights into citizens’ needs and preferences, and discover opportunities for service improvements.

When looking to modernize a contact center experience, public sector entities must focus on having the ability to engage with people of all ages and demographics; communicate in multiple languages; and support accessibility (such as optimizing web pages for the visually impaired). Public sector organizations must operate contact centers that are sensitive to the needs of vulnerable populations whose citizens rely heavily on government services and support.

A primary goal should be to find the best ways to deliver services to citizens and interact with people in the communication channel of their choice. Bringing technologies and government platform environments together is the desired approach for delivering maximum benefits, leveraging reusable practices to enhance interactions with citizens. By providing a direct channel for all citizens to engage with public agencies, contact centers can contribute to government accountability and help deliver the best citizen-centric services possible, thus fostering greater confidence from the people in public institutions.

Applying advanced technology to support public sector customers

The demand for public services is increasing as citizens’ expectations are rising, while at the same time government budgets are often constrained. This places a premium on operating contact centers with efficiency and cost effectiveness. A cloud-based contact center that automates routine transactions supports these needs, while freeing up the capacity of agency personnel to serve higher-priority tasks.

Personalized data is a requirement in the modern contact center, to support advanced technologies such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems and Generative AI. IVR systems can be designed to recognize repeat callers and access their history and preferences to provide a personalized user experience. Generative AI can be applied to help agents provide personalized responses by dynamically generating scripts based on real-time insights about the customer.

The challenge when taking on digital transformation projects such as contact center optimization is that many public agencies are hindered by legacy technology and technical debt. Dealing with these requires a change in mindset and new approaches. Research and analysis has found that organizations should view tech debt as part of the modernization process and conquering it requires collaboration from all. For contact centers, that means dealing with tech debt in multiple technology platforms, and addressing organizational debt in the form of knowledge debt and process debt (among others) to arrive at a strategy that ensures a smooth communication flow.

Modernizing the contact center experience

DXC Technology is a global leader in helping organizations deliver an effective and cost-efficient contact center experience to their customers. Using a digital-first approach, DXC supports more than 500 million customer interactions across the globe every year. By offering cutting-edge customer engagement solutions such as Amazon Connect, Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves as a key global partner to DXC in cloud-based optimization engagements, which include contact center transformations in the public sector. Sharing lessons learned by DXC and AWS worldwide, the following are steps that public sector organizations can take to optimize the contact center experience:

• Embrace the flexibility of a cloud-based contact center. It is relatively easy to set up communication flows to facilitate citizen interactions using a cloud-based contact center. Cloud gives administrators the ability to iterate and make changes as needed to adapt to changing citizen preferences. Cloud also provides the scalability, flexibility and reliability that become even more important in critical situations — for example, if a disaster strikes, a special disaster line can be implemented. Ensuring optimized citizen interactions and efficient service delivery is critical, especially in challenging circumstances.
• Identify who is calling and why. Being able to quickly determine who is calling, and why, is the first step to improving contact center efficiency. Citizen information such as property address should be gathered, and leveraged to put each interaction into the proper context. Applying AI and machine learning can enable relevant information on the citizen and context of the call. Providing this information on a single screen can reduce the cognitive overload on agents and streamline the handling of incoming calls, improving overall customer service quality.
• Personalize citizen interactions. By using automation and AI tools to personalize citizen interactions, contact centers can foster a more citizen-centric approach and enhance overall efficiency in delivering public services. For example, the customer profiles capabilities in Amazon Connect allow organizations to automatically create user profiles, then provide personalized interactions and routing based on contact information and history.
• Use automation to handle basic inquiries. In order to maximize operational efficiency, public sector organizations should deploy automation technology, such as chatbots, to handle basic low-risk interactions to free up humans to focus on higher value, more complex issues. Another example of effective automation is the use of IVR systems to automatically direct citizens to the resource they are looking for and route calls to the most appropriate agent.

• Centralize contact center services. It is advantageous to effectively integrate and centralize multiple contact center services within a single government entity. This can be accomplished by deploying a cloud-based solution that streamlines cross-departmental processes in a way that citizens do not have to second-guess which department to go to for help. Establishing efficient processes and knowledge flows drives both a more resilient platform and a better experience for citizens.
• Use a multichannel approach with self-service options. A cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) enables a seamless, omnichannel customer experience for citizens. Public sector entities should offer various communication channels such as phone, chat and SMS to cater to specific user preferences. Robust self-service mechanisms that provide answers to basic queries should be integrated as a key component of any multichannel platform. By offering diverse communication channels and empowering citizens with self-service capabilities, organizations can optimize citizen interactions, improve accessibility and enhance overall service delivery.
• Gauge citizen sentiment to drive continuous improvement. When citizens engage with the contact center, interactions can be monitored and transcribed. Advanced AI and machine learning technology can be used to figure out the sentiment of the caller and sentiment analysis can be applied to detect common patterns. The power of data analytics is increased by sampling the entire universe of calls versus just doing a random sample. Supervisors can take advantage of this wealth of insight on an ongoing basis to coach agents to deliver excellent citizen experiences and refine their service delivery processes over time.
• Use a platform approach. The contact center should be integrated with all citizen services via a platform environment that users can easily interact with. Embracing a government as a platform for citizen services approach serves as a foundation for building more intelligent, tailored citizen services while fostering a collaborative environment for multisector participation to deliver these services. Such a platform allows relevant data, people and other resources from across the government to be connected across a core infrastructure, with citizen interactions originating in the contact center serving as a key component. By integrating contact center services into a broader platform environment, governments can improve accessibility, efficiency and effectiveness in delivering services to citizens.

• Employ a citizen-centric data strategy. This strategy places the empowerment and engagement of citizens at the forefront of public sector organizations’ data initiatives. By promoting transparency through open data practices, governments can foster greater trust, accountability and collaboration with citizens, ultimately leading to more effective governance.
• Empowering agents and boosting their productivity. Government employees and civil servants can be empowered with a single screen that shows them information about the customer, the reason for their call, past interactions, next-best actions, customized responses from knowledge bases using GenAI technologies, and more. The continuous improvement in artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to enhance agent empowerment and increase productivity, enabling more missions to be accomplished within flat headcount environments.

Tying it all together for the public sector

The many components of a successful public sector contact center need to be integrated and streamlined to provide citizens with a seamless, satisfying experience. The goal is to provide the right blend of automation, AI and human interaction to deliver exceptional, differentiated customer experiences. DXC and AWS offer a wide range of technology and services that can be tailored to the specific requirements of public sector organizations.

DXC’s background and experience in developing, implementing and managing contact centers is complemented by extensive systems integration and IT infrastructure outsourcing capabilities. Working with AWS, Amazon Connect helped implement a contact center transformation within DXC that is providing the scalability and agility to deliver a seamless customer experience. Taking advantage of the robust cloud capabilities offered by AWS, the solution is enabling business benefits such as the ability to add agents more easily, while reducing costs in areas such as on-premise hardware.  

Amazon Connect’s cloud-based customer experience solution features all the key components for public sector organizations to optimize and operate a contact center. For example, Generative AI is leveraged through Q in Amazon Connect to allow contact center agents to access contextual information for incoming interactions and get suggested responses and actions for faster resolution. Amazon Connect also lets organizations perform essential business functions such as using AI-powered analytics to measure, track and improve performance.

DXC is leveraging its partnership with AWS to run and transform essential IT infrastructure for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the principal public agency for prosecuting criminal cases in England and Wales. As part of a service desk transformation, DXC is optimizing CPS’s Amazon Connect and ServiceNow platform to make use of AI and process automation to improve user experiences. Part of the transformation is a “digital by default” strategy designed to promote interactions via channels such as self-service, reducing calls to the service desk.

It’s time to modernize the contact center to achieve citizen delight

Many recognize that now is the time to increase the efficiencies of operating contact centers.  

A key goal of a contact center modernization should be to automate basic tasks to free up and deploy resources on higher-priority missions. Another imperative is to use personalized data to provide tailored interactions. An effective modernized contact center can enable enhanced service delivery, contributing to improved civic engagement and greater satisfaction with public services; it also can promote overall governance across agencies. By embracing these strategies and leveraging advanced technologies, public sector organizations can elevate their contact center operations, ultimately enhancing citizen satisfaction, trust and engagement.

Learn more about DXC's partnership with AWS and about DXC in the Public Sector.