Winning Practices for Government Contact Centers in 2004
Lessons Learned That Your Agency Can Use Right Now
Presented by
Daryl L. Covey
Daryl.L.Covey@noaa.gov
Government Contact Center Community of Practice
and
Federal Consulting Group
Nominations for the 2004 Government Customer Support Excellence Awards reflect an even more fascinating array of creative approaches, progressive endeavors, and impressive accomplishments than in the previous years. This paper shares key perspectives and practices cited in them to help accelerate our public sector customer support further into the 21st Century paradigm. Credit for the content is due entirely to the nominators from all across Government!
Our Uniqueness
The tremendously broad context of our collective accomplishments is critical to appreciating fully their diversity and significance. As a sector, we’re involved in essentially every line of business known to the private sector, plus many unique to us. As a community, we’re beginning to transition from a stovepipe structure characterized by external customers not knowing which agency is responsible for their issue to one in which it is possible to reach horizontally across levels and vertically through levels from a single touch point.
The fascinating array of often-unique functions performed by this year’s nominee organizations include:
Communicating
- » Communicating official policy
- » Communicating effectively across all education levels of the entire population
- » Handling volume surges associated with events and press releases
- » Reaching underserved populations (including multi-lingual assistance)
- » Assisting angry, grieving, and elderly callers, and, still
- » Performing such diverse ancillary duties as selling fuel wood and Christmas tree permits and assuring the traveling public that the airport is safe.
Handling Difficult Questions
- » Helping resolve urgent life issue questions
- » Ensuring legality of our customer responses
- » Addressing complex information originating from diverse bodies of specialized knowledge
- » Dealing with a wide range of privacy data and issues
- » Providing empathetic medical information
- » Courteously handling misdirected questions outside our supported services
- » Balancing competing needs of internal and external customers
Meeting Requirements and Expectations
- » Incorporating into our workload the “add-ons” typical for contact centers (such as an IT help desk also monitoring local weather and issuing warnings)
- » Meeting Federal Section 508 requirements for our portals in order to better serve citizens with disabilities
- » Sensitively supporting functions such as child support enforcement
- » Increasingly interfacing to other agency or interagency automated systems as interoperability increases
- » Complying with customer service standards in Federal Executive Order 12862
Business aspects
Our customer portals are also increasingly addressing fiscal constraints and stewardship of appropriated funds through business case reasoning. We’re realizing the economic and customer satisfaction impacts of well-designed customer self-searches of data and publications online as well as the value of involving people from the front lines in web development to ensure responsiveness of the results to customer needs. Electronic self-service is also seen by some organizations as a way to handle new customer issues that originate from expanding areas of responsibility.
Innovative customer support contracting practices cited included:
- » Economic rewards or penalties based on customer satisfaction survey results
- » Bid specifications that include funding for public information outreach
- » Pricing option years successively lower to capture return from efficiencies to be gained.
One nomination cited ISO 9001 certification as an indicator of process excellence, and another described seamlessly continuing critical services by exercising contingency back up from their two centers on the east and west coasts, respectively—both of which were impacted by natural disasters in the same year!
Teamwork
World-class customer support requires highly effective teaming across, within, and external to the organization. Significant approaches cited, both classic and creative, included:
- » A cross-department knowledge base and pool of librarians at the state level
- » Regional offices sharing best practices, resources, and emergency backup at the federal level, and
- » Teamwork between city entities, media consultants, and vendors to minimize citizen impacts of a new rollout at the local level
Strong internal customer support teams do things like:
- » Capitalize on team diversity in education, experience, ethnicity, and interests
- » Make each team member responsible for learning and sharing within their own specialized area
- » Create a collegial atmosphere
- » Appreciate the increased job satisfaction which comes from being better equipped to meet customer needs
- » Hold regular meetings and provide other feedback mechanisms between front line personnel and top management, and
- » Create shared monetary rewards among employees for meeting team service goals.
Other notable practices, on a broader scale, were:
- » Having operational managers educate people on the front lines about their respective divisions
- » Joint operation of a consolidated interagency center where customer representatives understand the various rules and policies of the participating agencies
- » Daily notifications to the customer support center about “hot” operational issues impacting citizens, and
- » Sharing problem trends and service improvement opportunities with customers.
Given that “jointness” and shared support operations are becoming a key trend in our sector, it was notable that one central help desk supported 14 bureaus!
Technical Excellence
Key applications of technology cited in the nominations included:
Databases
- » A referral database designed to equip any one in the organization (including those outside the contact center) to answer basic questions
- » Web links in multiple web pages existing as single notations in a central database for easy and comprehensive updating
Knowledge Sharing
- » Telework and full training capabilities to facilitate working from home for employees with significant disabilities
- » Internal intranet for enhanced knowledge and information access
- » Identifying problem criticality through predefined screening questions.
- » Constant updating of a highly visible and accessible “Top 20” web sites or publication list
Electronic Tools
- » Virtually-connected, dispersed support sites with best services routing
- » “Reverse” community notification of significant occurrences or outages from the 911 center
- » Use of web chat and ability to “push” prepared solutions to customers electronically
- » Redundant pathways across sets of web pages
- » Virtual collaboration via IM, chat, and screen sharing for technical support
- » Automated customer trouble ticket submission and tracking
- » Complete tracking of actions from first contact to customer satisfaction
Involving Customers and Employees
- » Asking customers to suggest new links and report bad links
- » Setting up a process through which a “dissatisfied” survey response initiates urgent immediate customer contact by a special group
- » Having front line people help plan future customer process improvements
Customer Focus
To be highly effective, our customer support must be built around the needs and nature of the customer, in all their diversity! This is not easy given that we as a community have the largest and most diverse customer base of all. Shared principles and practices addressing this goal included:
Management
- » Constituent-driven web site content management
- » Uniformity of look and feel, searching, editorial standards, navigation, etc. across agency web sites
- » National training and quality assurance programs for staff of regional support centers to ensure consistency
- » Incorporating Tier 2 (advanced level of expertise) support at the customer point of contact
- » Integrating feedback and other data gathered across all contact channels to capture the full “voice of the customer”
- » Educating users about both impending change and why it is necessary
- » Providing overlapping shifts for continuity of handling
- » Maintaining service (external) and operating (internal) level agreements for timely processing and resolution
Contact Center Staff
- » Visualizing the contact center as a front door and access point for all stakeholders
- » Delivering consistent responsiveness and assistance across all contact channels (voice, chat, email, etc.)
- » Ensuring responses that are relevant to peoples’ real-world needs
- » Advocating for user impacts of proposed changes
- » Handling multiple types of inquiries during one call to one contact point without necessity of phone transfer
- » Helping citizens navigate complex bureaucracy and paperwork processes
- » Ensuring that callers are not frustrated or confused on how to access services or resolve issues
Outreach
- » Using customer feedback to plan new publications, services, and FAQs;
- » Providing personalized information in an easily usable format when dealing with complex regulations and/or sensitive areas such as medical care
- » Providing online resource centers for specific constituencies
The Critical “Extra”
Too often in Government we get the horse ahead of the cart. The foundation of world- class customer support is customer-centric culture. Migrating to this is our biggest challenge as a community. What makes it happen is shared purpose and vision, which nominators have expressed as follows:
- » “Working together to get the right solution for the customer”
- » “Liberating customers from waiting in line or on the phone”
- » “Professionalism and unflappable good nature never waiver”
- » “Responsiveness, professionalism, and accuracy”
- » “Providing the public an excellent resource for their tax dollars”
And my favorite of all, from this year’s nominations:
“Customer service isn’t learned from a manual, it comes from the heart.”
