More effective communication with constituents in the digital age has been an important issue for councils for a long period of time with many in various stages of digital transformation. However, the coronavirus crisis has created a number of unique challenges that make the need for digital transformation to be accelerated and for tools that enable councils to communicate better also put in place. These challenges include ongoing, periodic requirements for staff to self-isolate; homeworking; cutbacks; closure of in person customer service centres; and the need to actively reach out at scale to all sectors of the community and receive a quick response so they can identify vulnerable people.
Outbound Communications and the Vulnerable Community
Councils can reach out to inform with traditional mail and then with digital options like email and SMS. These channels are effective and sufficient when the situation is not life threatening, urgent, or when the target group is savvy, active, and capable of replying quickly. For example, notifications to changes to council tax, voting forms and the day your bins will be picked up.
But with coronavirus it is different. It is essential that announcements – for the purpose of the target audience being able to protect themselves and the wider community – reach everyone quickly and it is confirmed they are understood. Unfortunately, the elderly and other vulnerable groups who are at greatest risk also tend to be less likely to be found on digital channels and even less so to reply quickly. It is essential to engage with these groups because they will have to spend longer periods under lockdown, they will likely live alone, might not have the support of relatives, have trouble coping and may not know about what help is available. For example, are they aware of community support schemes to help them with shopping? Do they know when supermarkets are open for elderly?
Another unfortunate reason why it is imperative to contact them is the number of scams that has arose targeting these groups. These range from fake masks to posing as council workers in Swindon, delivering food parcels with a view to gaining trust to rob the house or borrow money, at a later time. Many of them will feel uncomfortable discussing their feelings over digital channels and could feel shame and embarrassment if they are being blackmailed or a victim of a scam.
Automated Dialler
The best way to engage those vulnerable key groups in the detailed way necessary is a phone call, but that is a more expensive method. The way to make your dialling costs much cheaper is to use an automated dialler.
An automated dialler dials the number for your agents in the background, filtering out voicemail, hang ups, busy signals, no answers, and using algorithms to predict agent availability. The result is that your agents spend much more of their time talking to customers rather than dialling and waiting. Additionally, they have their hands free to focus on learning about the customer and for writing notes.
But this is not all the benefits as it also includes great administration tools for supervisors to, for example, listen in on calls, create scripts and segment the people being called.
Sentiment Analytics and Call Recording
One of the key purposes of this campaign is to try and identify signs of vulnerability, anxiety, depression or even shame, which might be signs of being cheated. One way to achieve this is the use of real-time call analytics with sentiment identification. Sentiment analytics are designed to pick up keywords and phrases in real-time to see if agents are being compliant and to understand your customers’ attitudes to that call. They can also be extremely helpful in this scenario to look for the signs of vulnerability mentioned above. What do we mean? The software can be programmed to look for those vulnerability needs, supporting your agents to ensure signs are not missed. Both supervisors and agents can be alerted and then in real-time or later delve deeper with the resident.
These call recording are also an exceptional and essential resource to carry out further analytics on how your agents are performing and what the attitudes of your residents towards the council and the situation, enabling you to finetune services.
Virtual Agent and Reducing Costs
While a dialler will make your customer service team more productive, automation can bring down your costs much further. A virtual agent combined with real time sentiment analysis and live agent handover triggers, can deliver almost all the key functionality at a much lower cost and crucially be able to do it in a quicker time. A virtual agent can be designed to sit on the dialler as an agent and make calls over a traditional telephone line. If scripted correctly it can give out your announcement, check it was understood and then delve deeper into the emotional state of a resident in a true natural language conversational experience. The sentiment analysis mentioned above can be designed to look for keywords or phrases. When they are picked up, a live agent can be alerted to take over the call or call back later.
Implement Digital Transformation
The above details how to most effectively reach out to residents who don’t have the Internet or may be believed to be vulnerable. For other groups, it is both necessary and more cost-effective to use digital communication. This applies to not just outbound communication like email and SMS, but inbound as the closure of council walk-in centres have left residents without any direct channel to approach the council. In the case, of these other groups many prefer to be contacted by email or SMS and these methods are much cheaper. Depending on the timeframes in which it is necessary to contact the groups concerned the council can use different approaches: it can directly target with a dialler, or first pursue that target group with other forms of communication, and then with a dialler if they don’t reply.
Website Live Chat
With the closure of walk-in centres, your residents will be looking for other channels to get information. Your website is crucial but if residents are looking to ask questions because their query is more complex, then they will want to interact with an agent and try to call you. Live chat is a much cheaper way to provide that interaction as one agent is able to handle several chats at the same time.
Chatbot
A chatbot integrated into your live chat and sat on your website or social pages can help. A bot enables you to automate your customer engagement through text conversational experiences. Similar to the virtual agent, you can also integrate the functionality around sentiment analysis and live agent handover. Your employees can then spend more time on key interactions, you can engage customers 24/7, reduce queue waiting times and lower customer service costs.
Omnichannel Functionality
We have already outlined the importance of offering multiple channels to contact residents and the likelihood they will reply on a different channel. Using an omnichannel solution with all their communications on a single customer journey record will save time in dealing with them and most importantly ensure that vulnerable cases don’t slip through the net because the agent has no history of communication from other channels.
Hosted Software
While the government has started with a phased end to lockdown, we should not view this a return to normal and our on-premises software systems. The return to the office has many conditions, another outbreak of coronavirus will mean a quick return to homeworking, and our contingency planning should prepare for that eventually as it is a likely scenario either in the short or longer term. With that in mind, hosted software, which can be accessed through a browser anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection, makes much better sense. By implementing hosted software throughout your company, you can allow your employees to benefit from a seamless software experience whether they are at home or in the office and the ability to instantly continue to do their job and service your constituents.