Putting Customers at the Heart of Local Services

By **Ian Taylor**, Public Sector Sales Executive

Putting Customers at the Heart of Local Services

By Ian Taylor, Public Sector Sales Executive

Digital innovation empowers twenty-first century consumers to choose how and where to buy products and services, and leading brands like Amazon and Uber have raised customer expectations for superior service ever higher.
Experts from Gartner refer to customer experience (CX) as ‘the new battlefield’, revealing in a recent report that “63% of business leaders believe to build customer loyalty, their CX teams must focus on creating new and innovative customer experiences.” They added, “47% of business partners want their CX teams to be better than their competitors in most categories, and another 38% expect them to be “world class.”

38% of business partners expect their CX teams to be “world class.”

However, what does that mean for public services provided by local councils?

Local authorities don’t have direct competitors aiming to increase market share nor start-ups disrupting public services, but they can benefit the “citizen experience” by embracing CX best practices from leading consumer brands.

It’s vital that councils transform citizen-facing services. Consider a resident’s experience of ordering a new parking permit compared to ordering a book from Amazon? Similarly, submitting an online planning application compared to requesting a car insurance quote?Improving the experience for citizens, local businesses and public sector users increases compliance, enhances public confidence and engagement, as citizens begin to see the value of public services, while also leading to cost reductions.So how do councils achieve that? Well, it takes a new approach to listen to what citizens and local communities are saying.Typical approaches involve using “voice of the citizen” insights to identify trends in public opinion. Additionally, contact centre managers will review a subset of interactions to keep a pulse on public sentiment. However, these approaches are limited and only evaluate a small portion of the communications. Many of those, don’t have a material impact on building credibility and relevance.Three key steps are critical to identify and focus on those essential citizen experiences:

Automation

Optimise salient interactions

Integrate into systems of record

Each of these topics is a dissertation by themselves. Here’s an abstract of each to get the discussion going.

AutomationHow do customer service agents identify common citizen requests and route them to more efficient paths to a resolution? Using automation to handle routine resident queries, create and distribute regular reporting and extends the ability to make changes quickly. It ensures that the customer service agent focuses on those important interactions with residents.Optimise salient interactionsVoice of the citizen" insights are valuable as there are now more advanced capabilities that enable customer support teams to listen to residents in new ways.How effective would it be if council managers could automatically listen to 100% of citizens’ calls and instantly gain insights on public sentiment, hot topics, key community issues and new expectations? Magical? Sort of. We call it speech analytics and it comes out of the box with 8x8, so customer support teams are up and running in just minutes.

Integrate into systems of recordThis capability integrates communications into your CRM, service, support and productivity applications to place the information and subject matter experts that customer service agents need at their fingertips to drive first call resolutions. But it’s more than just embedding communications into those applications.A modern approach is to dynamically integrate communications into those applications so you can provide role-based experiences, the ability to “hot-plug” changes and provide context sharing to further support first call resolution faster.Essentially, enhancing a frontline service experience requires a focus to move people from apathy and inaction to awareness and understanding, and finally to action and advocacy.Local councils that consider the customer experience as part of their frontline services are leading the way by ensuring their customer service agents and digital teams have the right tools and insights to help make a difference for local people in terms of service efficiency, while improving internal productivity and service delivery costs.

Next steps

Find out how you can start using automation, optimisation and integration to create those salient experiences that actually improve perceptions of local councils and take public services into the digital age.

Contact our dedicated public sector team at uk-publicsector@8x8.com

For more information call 0333 043 8888 or visit 8x8.com/uk-public-sector