Georgia’s customer service crisis led to the use of chatbots //

Many government agencies were overwhelmed with requests for information and help when the U.S. shutdown in response to COVID-19. Georgia’s Department of Labor was one of them. It had to deal almost overnight with the unemployment rate doubled to 6.7%. This was a crisis of customer service, and customer service is a key component to the customer experience.

Donna Summer, Operations and Delivery Manager for Digital Services Georgia, said that when things shut down, people were furloughed and they had to apply for unemployment. The phone lines became so crowded, people would end up waiting for hours before being disconnected due to a technical problem.

DSG has a solution for 2020 that was not on many people’s radar, but it is now: Chatbots. The agency was already investigating chatbots when the crisis struck, which was fortunate for everyone involved.

Summer stated that “even before COVID we had been researching chatbots.” Our motivation is to meet our citizens where they are. We want to make it easier for our citizens, and emails and phone calls take time. For some people, that’s not their style. They prefer social media. Would they prefer a bot? We were researching it but when COVID occurred, we had no choice but to accelerate our plans.

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How quickly? How fast? This was an out-of-the box implementation, but it allowed the company to automate a major customer complaint: lost passwords.

She said, “Can you imagine being on hold for 3 hours without the ability to log in to their account and get their unemployment?” “That was a pressing need, and we are still learning or trying to learn from that how to optimize chatbots.”

DSG hopes that other state agencies see the usefulness of chatbots without having to be hit with a crisis. They’ve installed one on their site to achieve this.

The agency had done some research and became familiar with several companies. Ivy.ai was the one that caught their attention because they could limit where their chatbots got their data. This reduces the risk of AI “hallucinations” when it invents answers.

Sharon Harrison, Ivy’s Vice President of Marketing, said: “We built the bots based on the data sources provided by our customers.” “So, it’s no bots searching Google and everywhere else for information. You provide us with the content sources — web pages or PDFs, spreadsheets or videos. “The bot will only search for answers in that set of data.”

Summer and DSG see the use of chatbots as a matter of customer service: How can you meet customers where they are? at when they’re there, and in a manner that is easy to understand and use.

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Summer said that anyone who works a night shift can access information even when no one is around. If they don’t feel comfortable using a website to find information, they can type in their question. It’s their terms.”

Harrison adds that the chatbot can also be a powerful force multiplier.

Harrison said, “Let’s imagine Kara is on my marketing staff and she’s currently surrounded by phone calls and emails.” If I could pull Kara from this and allow her to use her skills in the implementation of marketing strategy, that would be great. I would rather she answer the questions that require one-to-one care and attention than the low-hanging fruits. This leads to staff turnover, because everyone gets burned out by these things.”

The increasing use of chatbots will hopefully mean that organizations already have infrastructure in place for their customers to be helped when the next crisis strikes.

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