3 Steps to Transforming Citizen Engagement

In today’s always-on era, both citizens and employees expect public sector organizations to provide reliable, easily accessible, user-centric services. Does your organization have the capabilities to address these diverse requirements?

Perspective Matters

You’re probably already exploiting digital channels as a way of giving your citizens what they want, but while you see digital channels as important for your citizen engagement strategy, you are not realizing the required outcomes…

Citizen engagement strategies are often designed from a departmental or service perspective – making it hard for customers to find and consume the information or service they want and much easier for them to simply pick up the phone.
Citizen engagement strategies designed from the citizen perspective, however, are able to deliver the outcomes required by your organization whilst at the same time giving citizens what they want.

Two people sitting at a table working on their laptops

What would this look like?

  • Citizens (and contact center agents) are able to easily find what they are looking for, reducing call volume
  • Citizens are able to track progress online, minimizing follow up calls
    Processes are fully automated, eliminating the need for manual steps except where business processes dictate
  • Citizens are prompted to authenticate themselves only for information or services that require it
  • Citizens have full control of their personal data
  • If help is needed, citizens are able to request help from a contact center agent
  • Citizen feedback would be requested appropriately, optimizing quantity and quality, and helping to optimize the digital first strategy
  • Citizens are able to participate in communities digitally supporting, for example, local projects
Close up of woman on her phone

How can you achieve your digital transformation strategy goals?

Government and public sector organizations continue to face unprecedented challenges as a result of the converging demands of the digital customer and economic uncertainty. While many government and public sector organizations view digital channels important to their customer engagement strategies, some of them are not fully realizing the advantages of a digital-first approach.

Follow these three easy steps and discover the benefits of a truly engaging customer service transformation.

Simplify Your Intake Process

  • Reduce the risk of citizens and agents incorrectly classifying requests
  • Provide both a diagnostic and documentary audit of the citizen and agent journey
  • Incorporate integrations that seamlessly enable property validation, locations to be accurately selected on a map and payments to be taken
  • Simplify the configuration of the solution, empowering changes to be made by both the business and IT
  • Work both online (desktop and mobile) for citizens and internally for employees reducing upfront and ongoing maintenance of the solution as well as empowering agents to better serve online citizens looking for help
Retired couple looking at iPad

Modernize the User Experience

  • Provide citizens with mobile access to information and services
  • Provide citizens with access to information in their preferred language
  • Provide citizens with access to open data
  • Put analytics into the palm of executives’ hands
  • Provide actionable visual reports for operational managers
  • Provide agents with a modern browser-based user client
Woman walking in downtown area on phone

Automate Your Processes

  • Automate the end-to-end fulfillment of service requests, whether requested by citizens online or by agents
  • Automatically create corresponding work order(s) in the back office systems
  • Automatically feed updates back to the citizen as the service request is fulfilled
  • Enable integration with or without middleware
  • Verint helps enabling you to configure the automation using widely-available technical skills
Woman working from home while holding a baby

Why Verint?

We’ve been working with the public sector for over 20 years and have a thriving customer base across the globe. This includes organizations such as the City of Boston, City of Minneapolis, City of San Antonio, the City and County of San Francisco, City of Edinburgh, City of Barrie, City of Markham, Hertfordshire County Council, the UK Home Office, Brisbane City Council, and more – all of which have invested in Verint solutions to help them deliver truly world-class and award-winning customer service strategies. We put these changes down to People, Solution, and Community.

  • The People

    We created a dedicated global business unit focused solely on our local government solution and the success of the organizations that use it. This business unit is fully responsible for product development, implementation and cloud services and support, giving it the control and flexibility to do what is best for our customers.

  • The Solution

    We’ve made substantial investments in the solution including a new thin client agent desktop, brand new customer portal and forms capabilities and a brand new integration capability. To say that the product has changed would be an understatement – you may not even recognize it. But we have retained all the things that are important to our global customer base so that upgrades are not complicated and new capabilities can be exploited when ready.

  • The Community

    One thing that makes local government different from other industries is the willingness to share experiences, best practices and configurations. Our online community helps our customers get the maximum benefit from this openness. As an existing Verint customer, make sure you join the EM Professional group within the community.

Featured Citizen Services Resources