Page 46 - GCN, June/july 2017

case study CLOUD
FCC uses cloud tech to
handle customer complaints
Modernization efforts are helping the Federal Communications Commission cut costs and increase transparency
BY SARA FRIEDMAN
The Federal Communications Commission receives thou- sands of complaints every year on issues related to phone, inter- net, TV and radio services. But until 2015, the FCC did not have
an efficient way to alert telecommunications pro-
viders of complaints and
respond to consumers.
The agency purchased Zendesk’s Support product to analyze, track, prioritize and solve customer com- plaints through its Consum- er Help Center as part of the agency’s efforts to move all its legacy IT operations into the cloud.
The Consumer Help Cen- ter is distinct from the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System, a cloud-based so- lution that was temporarily knocked off-line on May 7 and 8 by what FCC CIO Da- vid Bray said were multiple distributed denial-of-ser- vice attacks.
Zendesk’s software-as- a-service tool for manag- ing customer complaints replaced 18 forms with a single ticketing system that provides support via email
and a web form that sees up to 2,000 submissions a day. Approximately 98 percent of complaints are now filed on- line, with the remaining 2 percent sub- mitted on paper.
With the Zendesk platform, citizens can receive immediate replies to their complaint filings and track their status in real time. The process has reduced the FCC’s overall response time by an
average of 10 days.
FCC officials used to
produce quarterly reports with data on complaints, but the Zendesk system gives the agency a nu- anced way to analyze that data and find solutions to specific problems through a Socrata-powered ap- plication programming interface.
Sarah Millican, a digi- tal strategy adviser at the FCC, told GCN that the FCC’s use of Zendesk “to replace our on-premises legacy systems repre- sented the first external- facing SaaS product to go live at the FCC, but is one of many examples of how we’re \\\[using\\\] cloud-based technology to radically modernize the FCC IT enterprise.”
Building an on-prem- ises system would have cost the FCC $3.2 mil- lion, but Zendesk’s plat-
“What used to take
someone many hours or even days to piece together through an enterprise-level business intelligence tool
can \\\[now\\\] be accomplished
in a matter of minutes.”
— JAMES BROWN, FCC
42 GCN JUNE/JULY 2017 • GCN.COM
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