Page 99 - FCW, August 2021

missing the voice of the customer or the citizen here.”
A tipping point for natural
language processing?
The sheer volume of citizen requests may have finally pushed natural lan- guage solutions into the realm of the practical for many agencies, another
participant said.
“Commercial partners and large
companies have now been embrac- ing natural language, voice assistant machine learning tools for coming up on 10 years now,” the official said, “where it’s really been a struggle for government agencies until the last year.”
The official pointed to two prob- lems. First, “the cost efficiencies real- ly only come into play when you’re dealing with extremely large scale volumes. It makes complete sense for Amazon. It makes complete sense for Comcast. Whether it makes sense for every agency or every part of an agency? Less so.”
Second, commercial firms often “try to be so conversational that you lose the certainty of the message that
you’re delivering. I often joke that in a lot of cases in the contact center space, when acting as the voice of the federal government, we often want our people to act like robots. Why on earth do we want our robots to act like people? We want them to deliver extremely certain phrases. How do we help our consumers fit into the bureaucratic need that we have to get them to the exact right spot? That takes certainty.”
COVID drove the volume to create cost efficiencies, the official said, and the natural language algorithms have advanced to the point where they can “understand the intent of the caller,” and then deliver carefully “scripted language on the back end to provide an answer. We’re finally seeing that technology be available and be effec- tive.”
Internal customers first
For most agencies, citizen service vol- ume surged at the same time senior officials were scrambling to move their teams to telework. Roundta- ble participants noted that this was often more difficult than adjusting the
citizen experience — yet absolutely essential to allowing the workforce to focus on end customers.
Several officials said it took months just to provision employees with lap- tops and other essential remote-work equipment. “The supply chain hit us,” one noted.
At other agencies, the challenge was inconsistency. “A lot of our IT is fairly decentralized,” another official said. “Where I sit, we had a culture where people come on board and you give them a laptop, but that is not nec- essarily the case in other parts of the department. And so we just found that there were really big disparities and that complicated the response.”
Creating a constructive remote work culture took longer still. “I think we really need to think about this hybrid work environment where we have this distributed workforce, people in multiple time zones,” one official said. “Ultimately, if they feel comfortable with the technology, they’ll deliver better services. They’ll think more innovatively about how to apply the technology solutions to bet- ter serve the customers. I’ll plus one
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