RightNow® Helps EPA Fulfill Its Mission More Cost-Effectively
Goals
- Approximately 90,000 emails every month threatening to overwhelm agency’s capacity
- Impending reduction in incident-handling capacity due to de-funding of two contact centers
- Lack of consistency in replies to inquiries
- Lack of visibility into users’ issues and concerns
Achievements
- More than 70 percent reduction in email volume
- Responsive service despite contact center de-fundings
- Consistent, expert-approved answers provided across all communication channels
- Site user insights drive improvements in communications and programs
The EPA has a critically important and highly complex mission. In order to protect human health and the environment across the United States, the agency must address a wide variety of issues—ranging from regulation of vehicle emissions and the proper labeling of pesticides to the protection of wetlands and acid rain monitoring. However, like every other agency, it has limited resources with which to fulfill its mission. So it must do everything possible to operate at maximum efficiency.
At the same time, the EPA is under increasing pressure to communicate effectively with the general public. While its primary mission is essentially regulatory, it’s also important for the EPA to keep citizens and businesses informed about its regulations, programs, findings, and successes.
That ability to communicate has been hindered on two fronts. First, with roughly 90,000 email messages coming in every month, the EPA’s response capacity was being overwhelmed. The agency developed a backlog of inquiries and was simply diverting too much staff time to handling messages every day.
Second, two of its contact centers were being de-funded. So the agency needed a better way to manage the ever-growing volume of questions it was receiving.
RightNow proved to be the solution the EPA needed. By enabling the EPA to create an online knowledge base that answers more than 80 percent of users’ questions without human intervention, RightNow has produced a 70-plus percent reduction in email volume in participating offices. RightNow also makes it easy to quickly route the remaining emails to the appropriate subject-matter experts. These inquiries are all tracked, so participating offices can be sure that each one receives a prompt response. And, because all replies use the same approved answers contained in its online knowledge base, the agency provides consistent and accurate information every time.
Just as important, RightNow’s reporting tools give the agency full visibility into the issues and concerns expressed by those who check the knowledge base or send an email—so it has gained the necessary insight to respond to the changing needs of the American people.
“RightNow has had a significant, measurable impact on the EPA’s ability to deliver critical information to the public,” says Jeff Tumarkin, services manager for the agency’s enterprise customer service solutions group. “It has enabled us to improve our service across the board, even while closing two separate contact center operations.”
Meeting The Needs Of A Complex Agency
Before he even looked for a specific solution for the agency, Tumarkin did a careful assessment of its needs. This assessment included interviews with managers across the agency’s many departments. Based on these interviews, it was clear the EPA needed a more automated customer service system for handling email and providing self-service on its website. It was also clear that the system would have to be very easy for site visitors to use and for the agency itself to administer.
Another important issue for the agency was de-centralization. “The only way we could successfully implement a self-service online knowledge base for the agency as a whole would be if each department could manage its own content—even though the interfaces would have a standard EPA ‘look and feel,’” explains Tumarkin. “So we needed something that would allow us to maintain both distributed content management and centralized administration.”
After analyzing available vendor offerings, it soon became evident that RightNow was the best choice for the EPA. It provided the ease-of-use the agency needed for both site visitors and internal users, as well as the ability to appropriately balance centralized and de-centralized control. Its email management capabilities would greatly ease the routing and tracking of inquiries across the EPA’s departments. And RightNow’s hosted crm delivery model would speed deployment while eliminating all the upfront and lifecycle costs associated with conventional solutions.
Just as important, Tumarkin saw in RightNow a company with lots of previous success in meeting the needs of large federal agencies. “RightNow’s people were very responsive from the beginning of our relationship and obviously understood the challenges we faced in getting approval to move forward with a solution like this,” recalls Tumarkin. “Their familiarity with the public sector and their commitment to our success was a major factor in our decision to go with them.”
The decision proved to be a wise one. Within months, EPA had deployed a pilot program that helped prove the efficacy of the technology and drive internal consensus for wide adoption across the agency. Immediate email reductions meant agency staff had to spend less time forwarding emails and crafting replies. With the de-funding of the contact centers looming, EPA had a system in place that would enable it to continue providing quality service.
“With RightNow, visitors to our main EPA website no longer had to know exactly which department’s content area they needed to browse,” says Tumarkin. “They can now use a single interface to either find the answer they need or submit a question for a personal reply. RightNow does the rest.”
RightNow’s Easy-To-Use Solutions Deliver Many Tangible Benefits
By providing ongoing insight into user’s questions, RightNow enables the EPA to continuously improve the relevance of its knowledge base—thereby boosting the effectiveness and usefulness of its ready-made email replies and self service customer care. Recently, for example, the agency noticed an increase in the number of questions it was receiving regarding “black mold.” By adding appropriate content to its knowledge base, it was able to answer these questions definitively via self-service and eliminate several hundred emails from its workload.
“When your users drive your content, everyone benefits,” notes Tumarkin. “They get the answers they need, and we get to spend more of our time doing something other than answering the same questions over and over.”
EPA’s RightNow system also makes it easier for staff members in each department to forward email to each other when they find themselves confronted with an issue outside their domain of expertise. Plus, the system continues to track the progress of those emails, so that they never get lost in the shuffle—as can often happen in large organizations.
Tumarkin adds that these insights will ultimately help the agency better respond to the country’s environmental needs. “It’s not just a question of changing content on our site or clarifying the wording of a program description,” he says. “We can use RightNow to pinpoint geographic areas or industries that are really struggling with a particular issue, and take steps to respond accordingly.”
He emphasizes that the benefits the EPA has gained are a result of RightNow’s invaluable expertise, as well as its award-winning technology. “RightNow has helped a lot of organizations improve the way they communicate with multiple constituencies across multiple channels,” he says. “So, by engaging with them, we’re tapping into years of hands-on experience in addition to their robust solutions.”
US EPA Office of Environmental Information Support Site | US EPA Office of Environmental Information Homepage
About EPA Office Of Environmental Information
The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to protect human health and the environment. EPA has been working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people since 1970. It employs 18,000 people across the country, including its headquarters offices in Washington DC, ten regional offices, and more than a dozen labs.
Greg Gianforte