HFS Highlight: Design sophisticated digital self-service to provide top-notch citizen experiences

Today’s citizens have the same expectations for government and education services as they do when wearing their consumer hats; personalization, on-demand services in the channel of their choice, and proactive communication. The public sector is overdue for implementing strategies that will provide service at the right time while using taxpayer dollars efficiently.  The pandemic has brought this need into clear and urgent focus, forcing the world to go virtual and increasingly leverage digital channels for citizen services.

Designing self-service and digital solutions are a win-win for contact center design; not only are traditional voice-based contact center agents the most expensive kind of customer service but are less frequently a customer preference.  Governments need other strategies that will minimize costs while providing the services constituents expect.   The key to this is having the right design strategy and looking at the services framework from a human-centric and business point of view.  What kinds of services do citizens need and what are the best channels to service them?

ASR and NLU are the building blocks for intelligent self-service

In contact centers, the answer to escalating volumes of queries from citizens is not just to add bodies to answer the calls. The key new technologies here include automated speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) have provided much greater sophistication of digital self-service.   These solutions are available today and are providing benefits to many government and education organizations:

• ASR: Consumers have gotten used to ASR given the ubiquity of voice-enabled personal assistant.  ASR voice technology essentially listens to spoken words and identifies them.  The most basic IVRs used this technology for understanding “yes” and “no” responses, but the capabilities have grown tremendously in recent years, and combined with NLU capabilities, can create some compelling self-service capabilities.
• NLU:   Natural language understanding is a form of AI which helps to understand natural language in the (imperfect) way humans interact.  NLU breaks down speech so that the machine can understand what a person is intending to say.

These two technologies together, sitting on top of the various enterprise CRM and telephony platforms, can provide a powerful experience for citizens within an IVR.  Intent engines help to understand what services citizens are seeking, classify them, and thus set them up for the most appropriate responses.    Customers will feel as though the responses are much more natural, and the IVR easier to navigate. These capabilities became increasingly vital in 2020 as the pandemic triggered a flood of calls to state agencies, which quickly learned that an infinite amount of agents armed to answer calls will not solve the problem.  Marc Mancher, a Deloitte Principal leading the firm’s Federal, State, Local and Higher-Ed Digital Contact Center business lines, shared some of the challenges his clients faced during this overwhelming time.  “Government agencies have needed to turn to AI to meet constituents where, when and how they need services during a critical time for families,” he said.  “This intelligent self-service has helped to pay out CARES Act money to keep food on the table for families.”

Intelligent design is the basis for better citizen service

Citizens are the customers of the public sector, and ultimately customer experience is driving these advancements: how to get the customer what they need easier and faster. An intelligent CX design should be all about servicing customers ‘where’ (which channel) and when they need services as well as enabling them to seamlessly switch channels.  This is a complex design challenge, particularly as the pandemic environment has forced all of these interactions into a virtual model (here we can link to the other Highlight).  If you start in with a fundamental design that’s based upon aligning customer and employee experience, as we outline in our OneOffice experience, you can then build upon these capabilities to create more sophisticated, cost-effective, and customer-friendly interactions. This becomes the baseline for enabling employees with better agent experience and creating improved customer experiences. From this baseline, you can then begin to offer enhanced services such as robust self-service options.

In addition to the elegant design required, an understanding of the market dynamics and which players have what capabilities is very important.  These advancements are helping self-service become more relevant, fluid, and intuitive but are not all available in the suites from the big platform providers.  Some of the capabilities need to be plugged in from various bolt-on solution.  This is a rapidly shifting ecosystem, including infrastructure players as well as bespoke products and developer platforms, requiring an intimate understanding of the technologies and their capabilities.  Deloitte, a leading provider in the CX design market, has particular expertise in designing experiences for the public sector.  Mancher sees this as a tremendous opportunity for the public sector to provide better service to their customers, at a lower cost.  “The conversation needs to be about designing services for a customer, and then applying the right technology to execute on that experience,” said Mancher.   Most importantly, the technology must enable building these solutions rapidly to live up to shifting citizen expectations.

ASR and NLU generate rich self-service experiences in government services

Since the pandemic hit, we’ve learned a digital-first approach is likely the easiest, most sustainable, and least “disrupt-able” approach for many processes and communications.  As an example of advancing self-service, intelligent chatbots will eventually become hygiene and expectations will be that they are agile and intelligent, applying more advanced techniques like sentiment detection.  For several government clients, Deloitte was able to quickly build omnichannel self-service that never existed, in as little as four days in some cases.  Deloitte helped the state of New York, for example, enable the capability for 1,000 outbound notifications to citizens per day to mitigate volumes coming from unemployment inquiries.  The state is now building on that capability to make the platform more intuitive and sophisticated.

So these rapid deployments in chatbots we’ve seen as of late should not supplant going back to develop a more sophisticated design.  Rather, it shows that companies that have long resisted the fundamentals of omnichannel strategy – intent engines for channel design, augmented agents, virtual assistants – have been able to rapidly create these capabilities to manage volume surges and keep customers (citizens) satisfied.

The Bottom Line: elegant design using elements of NLU and ASR is required to put the building blocks in place for excellent citizen self-service

As companies continue to move out of survival mode and generate their long term plans, we will start to see a much more strategic use of emerging technology like the self-service advancements detailed above.  People are starting to think in new ways – not just about today’s problems at hand – but about how to respond to future disruptive events and be more flexible and adaptive.  Considering the complexity of this design and making the effort to create these journeys is imperative not just for profit-seeking companies;  the public sector also needs to embrace this approach to take cost and friction out of these experiences and provide better service to its citizens.