The Customer
The customer is a central governing body that utilises the growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels to optimise the delivery of critical services across the UK, while ensuring the highest standards of security and compliance are maintained at all times.
The Challenge
Key considerations included:
- A resilient, scalable multichannel environment - encompassing voice, email, SMS, webchat, and all major social media platforms, that would maximise opportunities for engagement with citizens.
- The ability to configure all elements of the interface to staff's requirements, making it as efficient and user-friendly as possible, with clearly defined supervisory levels.
- Robust cyber security and governance inherent in the design, ensuring data protection policies would be consistently applied and all compliance obligations met, while optimising the accessibility, quality, and utility of all data.
- Granular and broad visibility across the entire solution, allowing administrators to tailor the solution within predetermined parameters, allowing tools and processes to be continually refined in response to feedback.
- Bespoke dashboards and reporting, allowing analysts to effortlessly access key metrics and monitor every step of the citizen journey in real-time.
- Seamless integration with existing platforms, with scope to integrate further tools in the future.
Based on these criteria, an in-depth evaluation was conducted of eleven separate contact centre solutions, measuring their capabilities against a detailed list of requirements and the customer's long-term tech and data strategy. At the end of the assessment process, Exponential-e's deep experience across the public sector, consultative approach, and openness to developing bespoke solutions made them a clear standout, with their Contact Centre as-a-Service solution fulfilling all technical requirements. As a result, they were selected as the customer's technology partner for the new contact centre's design and implementation.
Key factors in this decision included the Cloud-based model, which aligned with the customer's ongoing Cloud transformation journey, the inherent flexibility the platform offered in terms of hybrid working, the ability to integrate existing apps, and its highly intuitive user interface.
Solution
In the run up to 'go live', the Exponential-e's project team worked closely with the customer's own teams to ensure agents were ready to adopt the new technology. Following extensive training, agents were able to make full use of the new platform on the same morning the legacy telephony system was switched off, without any disruption to live services. The already strong relationship between teams at both companies, established during previous complex deployments, proved invaluable here, with close communication and collaboration at every stage laying the foundation for the project's eventual success.
As all interactions were now taking place through a single, fully integrated platform, the consistent application of skills-based routing ensured citizens were put in touch with the appropriate agent as quickly as possible, with time on hold kept to the absolute minimum. In addition to optimising the path to successful resolutions, this also meant that analysts could access all data about each citizen's journey through a centralised knowledge base, regardless of the number of channels involved. A combination of real-time analytics and automated satisfaction surveys was utilised to measure the quality of each interaction.
To ensure this data could be used to its fullest potential, the customer was able to create bespoke dashboards for a range of metrics, including the channels and menus enquiries were received through, wait times, the agent who handled each, whether the call needed to be transferred, and the final time to resolution - all updated every fifteen seconds. This way, both analysts and supervisors could access a wealth of information on both agent performance and citizens' overall experiences, without needing to consolidate information from multiple channels and records, as had previously been the case.
With this critical information automatically collated in an actionable form and the ability to automatically apply service changes through the dashboards, the new contact centre enabled true data-driven decision making at all levels, so tools and processes could be constantly refined and, ultimately, the highest levels of service quality and availability maintained.
As an early adopter of hybrid working, the new contact centre only strengthened the customer's capabilities in this regard, granting supervisors maximum flexibility in terms of how agents were deployed, without compromising data security, call quality, or their ability to collaborate with their colleagues whenever necessary.
The new contact centre is constantly evolving, as the high volumes of data gathered during each interaction reveals new opportunities for service enhancements. Administrators can continue refining their tools and processes via their dashboards, with support available from their Exponential-e account team and a 24 / 7, UK-based support desk, whenever it is required.
All of this demonstrates how the ever-growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels can be used to improve wellbeing across the UK, and the potentially transformative power of technology when utilised in service of the public good.
Solution benefits
- A flexible, omnichannel solution for all citizen communications, optimising the delivery of critical services across the UK.
- A holistic view of every citizen journey through intelligent, real-time analytics.
- Automated tracking of agent performance, helping drive a culture of constant improvement.
- Fully tailored for hybrid working, ensuring consistent security and service quality wherever agents are connecting from.
- Full compliance with all applicable regulations around the handling of citizens' data, while ensuring it remains readily accessible to authorised individuals.
