I was recently in Washington DC where I attended a RightNow Government Executive Exchange. The mandate from the new Obama Administration was the primary topic of discussion; efficiency and transparency. We spent about 4 hours discussing how each of the agencies was working to meet this new mandate. Two things I learned —
Agencies are doing more with less and becoming more efficient.
Agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Customs and Border Protection, are delivering great experiences to constituents, while using lower cost channels to reduce operational spend and maximize employee’s time. For example, a new government client told me that they had a million more web site visitors in January 2009 than in January 2008. Since the agency is using RightNow to empower constituents to find information themselves, they were able to maintain their service level without adding staff to address the questions coming from more web site visitors.
Agencies continue to take constituent service to the next level and are becoming more transparent to citizens.
Our government clients know their constituents expect a different type of interaction. Consumer expectations are on the rise (see the last three years of the Harris Interactive, Customer Experience Impact Report). Whether they are dealing with a private or public organization, Americans demand great service. I heard many examples of government agencies answering the call for greater service by transforming their contact centers to deliver better experiences. A good example is the Army Training Support Center (ATSC). ATSC is providing seamless multi-channel support across phone, web and email to 350,000 officer, soldier and civilian students and ATSC is gathering feedback from their students along the way. Since transforming their contact center using RightNow, student satisfaction has jumped to 75 percent.
I am proud that we are helping government agencies meet the challenge of delivering better service to constituents – at a lower cost.
How are you doing more with less, yet still delivering high quality service? I’d like to hear your thoughts.
One approach to this problem is to streamline the agent-system interaction to improve agent efficiency and empower these folks to deliver a better customer experience.
RightNow recently wrote a technical whitepaper on the topic: http://www.rightnow.com/pdf/Agent_Efficiency_Productivity_and_User_Interface.pdf
One small additional note about the excellent paper cited here: when streamlining the entering of address information for your customers, please don’t make the mistake of assuming that all of us folk out here have US-style address information. Many times I have had to cajole a US-centric website into accepting that not everyone has a Zip code, or has a State abbreviation. And it is *very* irritating to get a country list with “United States” at the top, and then an alphabetic list of us apparently lesser countries following.