Page 98 - FCW, August 2021

FCWPerspectives
How COVID has
changed citizen
services
Record demand and pandemic precautions prompted some fundamental reassessments
The COVID-19 pandemic put unprecedented demands on agency call centers and citizen- facing digital services. New programs scaled up on short notice, in-person channels disappeared, and agencies were swamped with citizen inquiries that span traditional organizational silos — all while agency workforces had
to reinvent their internal operations.
FCW recently gathered a group of IT leaders to explore how agencies have responded
to these pressures, and where there may be new opportunities to break through old barriers to deliver better citizens services.
The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see page 98 for full list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
Supporting the surge
Not every agency saw dramatic increases in citizen requests. For one participant, there “was actually this constriction of volume based off of what we do for the government.” Inbound call traffic dropped by two- thirds, forcing that agency to reallo- cate staff during the lull while remain- ing ready for demand to bounce back.
For agencies directly involved in relief efforts, however, the work increased exponentially. Traffic to some federal websites spiked 1,000% as citizens sought answers and assis- tance. One participant told of process- ing as many transactions in a 24-hour period as that program normally han- dled in an entire year.
Simply adding more resources wasn’t enough. At one agency’s call center, the volume “exploded through the roof,” one official recalled. “We added thousands of new people in there, but that still couldn’t be man- aged from a human standpoint. The velocity of incoming calls was far exceeding any capabilities to scale up there.”
“We had to look for other ways to minimize or reduce the traffic com- ing in through our customer support channels,” the official continued. To ease pressure on the traditional phone channel, the agency created
self-service help resources and “added chat bot capabilities to do some very basic rudimentary questions to be answered.”
When email inquiries similarly surged, agencies turned to automa- tion and natural language process- ing. Not only could simple requests be handled without a human at the keyboard, but the analysis provided new insights into what citizens really needed. “We were able to see some trends, some sentiment analysis, to see the pervasive theme that’s coming across these millions of emails that are coming in, the official said. “We used that information to then inform our FAQs, policies, and inform our program offices and say, ‘Look, this is what we are hearing in an aggre- gated fashion from the customers and the citizens who are the recipients of these services.’”
“Quite differently, we are now lis- tening to the voice of the customer,” another official said. “The voice of the customer does not come through the standard channels of filling out our customer survey form. It happens organically. And guess what, we as consumers of technology today have many options of sharing our feedback and the most common of those are in social media platforms. If you’re not listening to that, obviously, you’re
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