Rightnow® Helps Colorado Department Of Revenue Survive Tax Season
Goals
- Deal with tremendous seasonal spikes in service workload
- Ensure consistent, accurate answers across all communication channels
- Develop a better understanding of taxpayer issues to improve overall service quality
Achievements
- Highly responsive to constituent needs, even during peak season
- Email volume reduced by 45%
- Estimated $700,000 in savings over 18 month period
- Difficult policy questions only have to be answered once
- Better able to promote other online services
Few business' seasonal "crunch times" are as severe as the Colorado Department of Revenue (CDOR). In the six weeks between early February and mid-March, CDOR may have to field 90 percent of its annual workload from its more than 2.1 million individual income tax filers. So it has to operate extremely efficiently—especially since it can only hire a few temporary staff to cope with the deluge. To make matters worse, tax-related questions can get pretty obscure. Are computer maintenance agreements taxable? How about goods purchased on an Indian reservation? And does the tax status of bottled water depend on whether it gets consumed on the spot or is taken home like a "prepared" food?
These are tough questions for CDOR’s frontline personnel to answer. In fact, without RightNow, those personnel would have to constantly interrupt CDOR’s subject-matter experts, who have plenty of work to do as it is. In addition, such escalations could significantly delay responses to citizens and business owners. CDOR knew it needed a contact center application that could help it get answers to people quickly—on the phone, via email, and over the web—and turned to RightNow.
With RightNow, CDOR can capture knowledge anywhere in the organization and apply it to customer interactions as they occur on any communication channel. This ensures the speed, accuracy, and consistency of the answers it provides regardless of how hectic the action gets. As a result, email volume has dropped dramatically by 45 percent—while the knowledge base receives over half a million hits.
Consistent, precisely worded answers are essential for CDOR to fulfill its mission, since tax laws are often subtle and misunderstandings can create problems for both the state and its constituents. "People will actually keep asking the same question on the phone, via email, and online until they get the answer they like best," explains Ro Silva, CDOR's customer service manager. "With RightNow, we eliminate that type of 'treasure hunt' by giving the exact same answer across every channel."
At the same time, RightNow provides CDOR with tremendous visibility into its customer service activity. This enables CDOR managers to discover the types of questions that are being asked most frequently, which in turn allows them to get clear rulings from the appropriate subject-matter expert.
"A lot of times, the answer to a question isn't that simple," says Silva. "With RightNow, we can track a complex issue as we resolve it—and then capture the result so we don't have to go through that same process a second time."
Another major benefit to CDOR of using RightNow has been the way it promotes the use of online channels. Because Colorado taxpayers can get great service from CDOR via the web and email, they are more likely to make use of its other web-based services. This is helping CDOR achieve even greater operational efficiencies, which in turn allows it to provide more responsive service within its existing resource limitations. "RightNow is an integral component of our overall strategy to better serve constituents and reduce our operational costs by leveraging the web," says Silva. In fact, CDOR estimates the department saved $700,000 in roughly 18 months.
In addition to benefiting from RightNow's crm software applications, CDOR has taken advantage of RightNow's professional services capabilities to optimize its site design and incident business rules. RightNow's experts have also shown CDOR how to leverage RightNow's reporting capabilities to better respond to constituent needs and pinpoint opportunities for process improvement.
"RightNow has been a great partner for us as we continue to improve the quality of the service we provide," says Silva. "The efficiencies we've achieved with RightNow's help have been particularly critical in enabling us to cope with the onslaught of questions we get during our peak season. It's a great company to work with, and the results speak for themselves."
Colorado Department of Revenue Support Site | Colorado Department of Revenue Hompage
About State of Colorado Department of Revenue
The Colorado Department of Revenue is responsible for numerous government operations, including tax collection. Its mission is to provide exceptional service in an effective, innovative and fair manner that instills public confidence while fulfilling our duties to collect revenues, license qualified persons and enforce the laws in an atmosphere that promotes dynamic solutions through meaningful employee involvement.
Greg Gianforte