Government can apply lessons learned from industry’s success in automating help desk interactions for citizen services.
Artificial intelligence–enabled chatbots, for example, have made it easier for travelers to change flights without being caught in an interactive voice response call loop, when what they want is a resolution, not necessarily to speak to a human.
The Department of Government Efficiency targeted multiple call center programs across government, looking to consolidate them, and automation that could be scripted and then tailored to specific agencies and even citizen sets made the changes more palatable. Meanwhile, Medicare and Medicaid essentially rely on a call-avoidance strategy, where public-facing intelligent automation handles straightforward citizen requests.
Taking a page from that playbook, more agencies should look to automate inefficient, manual processes where time is lost on repetitive tasks, as well as high-volume citizen services.
Click the banner below to start enhancing citizens’ digital experience.
3 Key Government Automation Use Cases Have Emerged
CDW Government helps agencies perform cost-benefit analyses and determine the level of effort needed to automate particular use cases, as well as the return on investment they’re likely to see over months or years.
The three early government automation use cases that have emerged are AI-enabled automation, automation augmenting security to track evolving cyberthreats and automation managing Device as a Service.
With government having reduced personnel in the short term, and with the potential need for increased personnel in the future, the number of devices agencies need is likely to fluctuate. DaaS helps agencies ramp device provisioning up and down as needed on a subscription basis, avoiding a capital acquisition or technology glut.
CDW Government uses automation and scripting to reduce device touchpoints and increase the accuracy and consistency of deployments. In fact, government has come to rely on contractors for this kind of automation, though not yet at scale.
With high-volume citizen services, it’s generally better to go with an existing platform built to handle millions of engagements, as opposed to a bespoke solution. The latter is better when an agency requires a validated person on the government side of the phone due to sensitive information being discussed, such as Social Security benefits.
Click the banner below for the latest federal IT and cybersecurity insights.
Taking Advantage of Institutional Knowledge to Apply AI
Some agencies are using AI to determine where automation use cases might help them.
Current interactive voice response systems aren’t great at determining when to divert a caller with a one-off question to a human, as opposed to validating a Medicare benefit automatically. This is where AI could help but isn’t being used yet to make such determinations.
For this reason, CDW Government invests time in understanding its agency partners’ missions and requirements, going so far as to hire subject matter experts who previously worked at certain agencies and who may have departed during recent reductions in force. That insider knowledge and talent isn’t going to waste.
From there, we work with the agency to apply automation and scripting to the low-hanging fruit among use cases before moving on to those that might benefit from leveraging AI.
