Page 52 - FCW, November/December 2019

P ublic Sector Innovations elements, and a utility bar gives agents rapid
the veteran community. Wait times dropped from an average of about 20 seconds in 2018 to just nine seconds this year. More than
half of the calls were general inquiries, and 94% of callers had their concerns addressed promptly.
The hotline exceeded VA’s and veterans’ expectations. About 1% of callers rang the hotline just to praise agents’ service.
relationships.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s gold
access to related data, making it easy to navigate profiles.
Salesforce Knowledge is built from informational documents on the platform’s processes and functions and lets agents share data within the organization.
In May, the VA announced that the hotline had received more than 250,000 calls from
Zoning Wizard and ZDOCS
standard in the agency’s quest to provide top- notch services is the Walt Disney Company’s approach to soliciting customers’ opinions and gathering relevant data to ensure that visitors remain delighted with the company’s parks, online resources and retail stores.
Perdue has pushed USDA to fundamentally change how it delivers services to its customers by analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. Officials knew the customer feedback data it was gathering could fuel IT modernization efforts, but they had to make sense of it all first.
USDA’s Voice of the Customer Centers
of Excellence Program uses feedback management technology to handle
the customer data coming in from all engagement channels and creates an enterprisewide view of the agency’s customer service posture. Those analyses then fuel what Perdue calls an internal culture of continuous improvement.
Ultimately, USDA officials want other agencies to adopt and tailor the program to their own customers.
White House VA Hotline
Department of Veterans Affairs
The Department of Veterans Affairs launched the White House VA Hotline to provide
live answers to questions about benefits, resources and services. The hotline is open around the clock and staffed by 60-plus agents, 90% of whom are veterans. And it was deployed in only six months.
It runs on Salesforce Service Cloud, a secure environment that lets agents log, update and track call details. They can easily personalize conversations and route more complicated questions to another office.
The hotline is built on two Service Cloud components. The Salesforce Lightning console, a customizable interface to
the company’s contact center and case management solution, allows agents to review multiple cases on one screen. A preconfigured layout displays crucial case
District of Columbia Office of Zoning
The Interactive Zoning Information System was the District of Columbia Office of Zoning’s first automated system for online filing, processing and management of zoning-related cases. But that system still relied heavily on paper. Then Director Sara Bardin and her team added two new features: the Zoning Wizard and ZDOCS.
The Zoning Wizard guides users through the zoning-change application process so that they can file cases themselves rather than paying attorneys to do it for them using a paper form. The tool walks applicants through the process, asking for details such as the location of the project, square footage and certifications for carrying it out. The redesigned application eliminated redundant fields and consolidated the entered information automatically, reducing the data entry process by 50%.
“It was saving time for the public, [and] it was making it a lot more user-friendly than filling out a generic form,” Bardin said.
ZDOCS is a mobile application that zoning commissioners and board members use to access up-to-date case information and documents for hearings.
“Since the start of this office, we would have to copy all of the documents in a case file and courier it to each one of the board commissions or zoning commission commissioners each week for them to review all the files before the hearing date,” Bardin said. “The commissioners would have to lug these packages back and forth, and I can’t tell you the amount of paper that we had stacked up here. Every week you would have hundreds of pages that, once they were done with them, there was nothing to do but throw them away.”
Built with open-source software, ZDOCS has allowed the small zoning office to transform operations, save money and free workers to focus on more important tasks.
50 November/December 2019 FCW.COM