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Telephony: Streamlining Service Delivery
President Obama has made it clear that now, more than ever, we need to make every dollar in the budget count. Improving and consolidating our customer service offerings is an excellent way to minimize our costs while enhancing our public-facing functionality through technology solutions. On April 27, the President signed an executive order to streamline service delivery and improve customer service. The order sets out guidelines to help federal agencies keep pace with and even exceed the public’s customer service expectations.
One of the major areas where we are implementing this executive order at DOT is in the field of telephony. By streamlining how the telephony service is provided and implementing call center service benchmarks, we are following an old business paradigm: Fix the simple problems! Our telephony customer service program will add value for callers through quicker, increased access to relevant, accurate DOT information.
DOT maintains several toll-free phone numbers in addition to myriad departmental lines. Toll-free lines support customers calling DOT for general information, complaints and specific modal services. We aim to streamline our toll-free service and implement benchmarks to make our toll-free services more efficient and more service-oriented. DOT must ensure that all numbers link to appropriate departments, programs or call centers and deliver the required information to the caller. Therefore, a large part of this task will be identifying and validating our toll-free numbers to ensure that listed numbers connect to the correct people or required information.
We are also working to simplify our phone tree commands as a straightforward way to improve customer experience and make the system more efficient. Simple changes can bring great results—it’s an easy fix to ensure that dialing “0” during a call will take a caller to an operator, no matter which call center they contact.
At the core of this entire effort, of course, is a focus on a holistic measurement of user preferences and needs. We are committed to establishing best practices based on our identification of caller needs. Caller surveys will play a crucial part of this effort to identify the specific services our customers want to use and those that we can safely retire.
In response to the president’s executive order, we have already completed an inventory of our toll-free numbers and retired approximately a dozen unused and unneeded lines. We will continue to identify unnecessary redundancy in this system and eliminate it where possible. This effort will save the department money and decrease confusion for our callers. Our commitment to customer service is an ongoing effort, and it should be an operating paradigm for every organization’s business operations.
Moving forward, we plan to work with the DOT operating agencies to find and implement customer service best practices while rationalizing our services. If you have any ideas or suggestions on areas where we can improve DOT customer service, please share them with us at Ideascale.
