Governments are facing increased demand for services, reduced budgets and a limited workforce. Deloitte and Cisco are helping them meet that demand through next-generation call centers that blend artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing to help governments better deliver services to citizens and automate thousands of hours of workload for overburdened call centers. In just the past six months state governments have handled three times the volume of financial assistance applications as during the entire Great Recession, and more intense hurricane and fire seasons will further strain the federal and state centers their citizens rely on.
“This is not just a strategy to deal with the increased demand for services brought on by the pandemic,” said Marc Mancher, principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Rethinking the customer experience and integrating automation and virtual assistants should be part of the long-term solution for every government. It is a critical tool in governments’ efforts to meet the pressures of changing demographics and reduced budgets, retain and maximize satisfaction and productivity of their workforce, and ultimately build trust with the public by improving their experience with services.”
Cisco’s leading-edge contact center technology and customer journey expertise powers over 3 million agents across 30,000 enterprises globally. Since May, Deloitte has helped government contact centers implement technologies to meet unprecedented surges in volume and address staffing needs. In the past four months, these contact centers have handled over 5 million public inquiries about public services to help families and businesses weather the pandemic.
“Governments can use this crisis to leapfrog from high-touch, in-person citizen services to fully digitized and highly automated experiences,” said Omar Tawakol, VP and GM, Contact Center Group, Cisco. “This is where we need to go to make it a convenient and satisfying experience for citizens, while also keeping ahead of the volume.”