Intelligent Customer Experience in Action
CDW’s Intelligent CX team is focused on improving customer and employee experience with technologies such as these virtual agents that enable self-service. This aligns well with agencies that want their customers to be able to fill out online applications without consulting a call center or update their addresses in a system using a chat, voice or text agent.
AI automates repeatable, mundane tasks and provides readily accessible information, so federal employees can focus on more complex customer interactions that require empathy, and customers aren’t left waiting on hold.
Virtual agents make the call center experience better too. Natural language processing and natural language understanding can listen to phone conversations and recommend specific information, websites or steps customers can take to solve their issues automatically and in real time.
At the same time, the virtual agent might be providing the federal employee on the other end of the line with a checklist of what he or she should say to meet the customer’s needs, ensuring compliance.
DISCOVER: Learn how the NIST is helping agencies better understand artificial intelligence risks.
The Steps to a Strong AI Pilot
Agencies looking to launch an AI pilot need to think strategically about the various use cases that would benefit their organization.
CDW offers what it calls exploration services, bringing in a digital strategist and technical expert to identify the different personas that interact internally and externally with a particular agency.
The next step is to group like-minded personas and ask the agency about the pain points that customers have interacting with their organization. Those might include long wait times due to a lack of agents, a lack of service options for customers calling in, insufficient information available on the agency website, or the lack of a mobile application.
CDW’s process captures a great deal of info, and then the agency must decide what its ideal outcome is for each pain point. The end product is called a user story.
From there, CDW ties in the appropriate solution or solutions and maps the technology to the use case being addressed. Among the multiple use cases the agency identifies, CDW will choose one with low complexity but a high ROI to build a proof of concept complete with AI — a tangible solution that can be shown to department leadership to demonstrate the value.
CDW not only provides a statement of work for putting that proof of concept into production, should the agency opt to, but a roadmap for the deployment of the other user stories created. For instance, CDW developed a web chatbot proof of concept for the New York Police Department recruitment team that explained the process and pointed potential recruits to testing locations. Though it never went into production, the roadmap still exists should the client wish to revisit the tool.
For agencies on the fence about an AI pilot, CDW also offers an ROI analysis of potential use cases.
This article is part of FedTech’s CapITal blog series.
