Background: The Unemployment Insurance Program determines eligibility​ and pays unemployment insurance benefits to persons who are unemployed through no fault of their own. Claimants file for benefits by phone or over the internet. To maintain their eligibility to receive payments, they must certify weekly by phone or internet that they have met specific qualifications and complied with specific actions required by law. ​ Federal law requires that​ states pay 87% of claimants within 21 days of filing.

 

Department Overview

 

In 2013 the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development had 1,300 employees and a $210 million budget. It served Tennessee’s 6.6 million residents and 120,000 businesses in six functional areas:

 

• Safety and Health,
• Workers Compensation,
• Labor Standards, Labor Statistics,
• Workforce Development
• Unemployment Insurance.

 

I

 

The Number One Problem – Unemployment Insurance

The Symptoms Concealed the Problems

 

In March 2013 the department faced significant problems in serving unemployment insurance claimants. Not dissimilar from those states are having in 2020.

• Dissatisfaction of eligible claimants, who were part of a 64,000-claim backlog that was delaying their much-needed payment, of many for six, ten, twelve months or more, was palpable.
  • In an effort to find out the status of their claim, claimants were calling the department more than 800,000 times a month. Clearly these were not all unique callers but were from people trying over and over to reach someone for help. The division had 67 claims agents attempting to answer a tsunami of about 40,000 calls a day. 
• The department had a completely dysfunctional unemployment insurance program that was operating on a 42-year-old COBOL system threatening to collapse at any moment.
• A program with outdated, ineffective and inefficient manual and paper centric processes and procedures. There were over 500,000 pieces of paper related to benefits claims arriving monthly by mail, e-mail or fax.
• Additionally, there were 1,130,000 million paper documents already stacked up or, of all things, on microfiche. We did not even have a microfiche reader!

 

Historically, department attempts to eliminate “symptoms” had been to ask for more positions and funding, which not only failed to end these symptoms but never resolved the problems. Like repeatedly taking aspirin to dull a headache which returns because the illness causing it is never eliminated. 

We took a different approach. Our priority was to identify the ‘root cause’ or ‘causes’ of problems. Eliminate these, you solve the problem and eliminate the symptoms. 

We realized we needed to focus on our customers’ needs both internal (employees) and external (claimants) and satisfy them by delivering service through 21^st​ century​ technical innovations.  One that measured, real-time, every transaction with the customer throughout their journey with the department. One that used this data to improve and modify how we served, real time.

             It was critical that we knew:

 

• Not just the volume of contacts, but the subject matter of every customer inquiry.
• The volume of contacts concerning a specific subject matter.
• How quickly a customer’s inquiry, regardless of the communication channel, was responded to.
• How many ‘touches’ and by whom, were required to fully resolve the issue or provide an answer.
• How long it took to resolve a customer’s issue or provide information.
• Know ‘real time’ how satisfied customers were with the service we provided.
• Create a personal profile of every customer and maintain a complete record of every step, touch and word of a customer’s journey through our system.

 

A Better Way to Engage Claimants

We realized that we must find a better way to engage our customers. We had to know more about who they were, what their issues were, and we had to be able to measure the satisfaction of those we served. After all, they were the only people who were in a position to tell us if we were succeeding or failing.

We had to fully understand their journey if we were to improve it. The capability to provide us this information did not exist in the legacy systems we were struggling with. 

In the digital age of the 21​^st century customers expect to interact with​ organizations, public or private, that utilize digital tools to deliver products and services efficiently and effectively and with as little friction as possible.  We had to find a better way to engage our claimants.

We evaluated three potential companies that represented themselves as having software that would meet our needs. Two were well known, very large companies that included in their proposal’s costs for just months of assessment, evaluation and program design amounting to $100,000 and $300,000, yet they still would not provide the functionality and management tools available from the company we ultimately chose. 

In February 2014​ we settled on the third company, Zendesk. A ticket-based, omnichannel system, was chosen.

Initially, the department was solely focused on determining answers to questions like:

• How many unique calls is the department receiving?
• How many times is the same customer contacting the department?
• What is the subject of the customer’s inquiry?
• How long does it take to process a customer’s request?
• What was the customer's satisfaction level?

We were amazed, and greatly pleased. Within two hours it began generating information that provided answers to these questions and gave us a clear, quick and complete view a customer's journey start-to-finish. Instantly we saw who was​ requesting help, what they were asking for, and how long it was taking us to initially respond and come to a complete resolution. Not to mention the fact that we would receive customer satisfaction score rating on each interaction.  

It took less than a week to complete the implementation of Zendesk’s email and helpdesk support and train 35 full agents on the new software. 

We were delighted. We began to feel that maybe we had a system that tracked our customers journey, efficiently provided them the answers they were looking for and did so while providing us information about our customers and how to better serve them. The kind of support we nor our customers had ever had before. 

Defining Customer Expectations

In our first attempt to conduct root cause analysis on the issues related to our call volume we were limited to only identifying issues that related to symptoms.  This was evident from the elevated call volumes that we continued to experience.

Once we implemented Zendesk ‘Support’ and started receiving context from the customers on the issues they were facing, it was quite clear as to what 85% of our problems were and why call volumes were still elevated.   In our process of taking claims for unemployment, we told our customers that their claim was pending until they either received money with an approved claim or a letter in the mail denying their claim.  This was a huge problem!  What does pending even mean?  85% of all customer inquiries were related to wanting to know when they would receive a decision on their claim.  We had failed to set the realistic expectations for our customers. 

Federal rules allowed for us to process claims within 21 days.  However, we had never communicated this to customers. They learned of this only when they called asking the status of their claim. Often within a day or two after filing their claim. So, we set out to fix that by taking the information we had collected from our scanning efforts with our document management system and was able to relay that information in the same way FedEx and UPS tell customers where their package is in the shipping process.  All the customers had to do was go online and check their status.

This instantly removed 85% of the tickets from our system as the customer was now able to do this on their own. We utilized the ticket information in a way to determine what our customers were telling us to help us find the root cause to our problems.  So, all was fixed...almost, but we live in a state of continuous improvement. 

A few months later and early one morning in our usual morning debriefing on operations, we looked at the dashboard and saw that our customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) had taken a big dip (from usual 85% to 43%).  What had caused that?  We quickly looked at the most recent ratings and discovered where the problem was originating.  We gathered the teams for that section and asked what changes had taken place overnight. 

• We asked the UI program had they made any program changes. The answer was no.
• We asked IT had they made any changes to the program code. The answer was no.
• We asked Communications had they made any changes to the website. The answer was yes.

 

They had made a small change to the homepage of our department’s website.  What change?  They had moved some things around and the link/button to check the status of a claim was now 3-4 clicks deep on the website.  This matched up with what our customers were telling us.  Within an hour of fixing this problem, the CSAT score began to rise back to normal.  In the past, this kind of problem would have taken weeks or months to discover because we had no real time information to help us track the customer experience, thus helping us find the root cause. 

In May 2016, we went live with a new system for unemployment insurance. In the beginning, there were some issues with customers not being able to properly file claims.  The Zendesk ticketing system allowed us to identify those problems very quickly early on. However, this was not before customers began contacting their legislative offices for assistance. 

Zendesk facilitated having all communication from our customers, regardless of what type channel, be it phone, email or online-forms​, funneled into one system. ​This feature, known as ‘omnichannel’, is a cross-channel content strategy that enabled our organization to improve our user experience. Rather than working in parallel, communication channels and their supporting resources are designed to collaborate. For example, a customer may have visited a brick-and-mortar career​ center for services. Information was collected from their onsite visit, which would later be accessed when the customer calls from a phone, accesses a live chat, email, or submits information on a form. 

It also enabled us to incorporate social media platform interactions. If a customer received services but afterwards used Facebook or Twitter to complain about the level of service they received, this information was linked back to their customer view for staff to reach out and work with them on making sure their needs are fully met.

Not all our customers had cell phones nor desktop phones. Some had computers, some may have had tablets, some didn’t want to talk to a person at all. They wanted to help themselves. With the omni-channel communication strategy, all of the above differences were met with one seamless solution. 

Traditional communication methods such as telephone, email, and fax were no longer efficient and effective. 

Self Service and Zendesk ‘Guide’

As mentioned above, many customers wanted to serve themselves. Get in, get the answer they needed and get on their way. For that to happen, they had to have access to a knowledge base of relevant information independent of our agents. 

The Zendesk Guide allowed the department to transfer knowledge from long tenured employees to articles that could be offered to customers when they searched for particular subjects.  This is called ticket deflection.  When a customer is about to submit a ticket, but the system recognizes the answer to this inquiry already exists, it will offer them the article with the answer to view before submitting their ticket. 

The ROI on this is massive, since it never takes a human to actually serve the customer.

Another great byproduct of guide is the ability to see what customers are searching for and yet there is no article available.  This is what we called missed opportunities. So, we then created a process for content generation within all our divisions to add new articles on a regular basis. This would be managed by our communications division to ensure the readability of each article. Remember, we didn’t want these to be filled with a lot of technical terms or acronyms no one would understand. 

This guide also later proved to help in onboarding of new hires. This system of transferring knowledge from experienced workers to articles for new hires to train on helped to reduce onboarding time from 6-8 weeks to less than 1 week. Guide never rests nor sleeps it just keeps growing and evolving as new issues arise and the old issues become new again. Guide is the heartbeat of the system and drives every other channel’s success in delivering consistent and seamless customer service. 

Zendesk ‘Chat’

In late March 2014​ we went live with Zendesk ‘Chat’. ​In the past, customer​ service agents typically spent 30-45 minutes trying to solve a problem. With live chat, it became possible to serve 2-3 Chats (customers) concurrently, effectively reducing problem resolution times by half and doubling or tripling production. 

With Chat our agents were able to see a customer’s information that had been gathered in all their previous interactions. This eliminated the need for them to ask the customer to repeat and explain what had been discussed in other engagements with the department. We’ve all experienced that aggravation when contacting both public and private customer service departments.

In the first 90-day period the department served 8,992 Chats with an 84.5% satisfaction rate. 34% were completed in less than 3 minutes and 50% in less than 12 minutes.

Zendesk ‘Talk’ is Cost Savings and Increased Efficiency

The expense to our department for using landline phones was unreasonable, in our opinion. Probably the case with most states. So, in the summer of 2016, we started using the ‘Talk’ feature from Zendesk. This allowed us to drop our landlines and the costs associated with using them and convert our agents to a set of headphones and the internet. 

This provided for a more personal phone conversation when our customer wanted it but also more consistent support across channels and an increase in agent productivity. Not to mention they were happier because they preferred the headsets as they were untethered. They could sit or stand up and move around (Figures 4 and 5). Additionally, our agents could record calls and team members were able to silently listen in on a conversation and if necessary, inject support if needed by the agent.

What were the costs that were eliminated from this transformation? An initial one-time cost savings of $630,532 from removing Primary Rate Interface Cards (PRI’s) and an annual cost avoidance of a $250,000 annual license fee. We also eliminated a $20 a month per desktop phone charge for approximately 250-300 phones, $60,000-$72,000 annually.

No Need for Additional Staff with Zendesk

Staff with the necessary skills and culture in the workplace are often some of the toughest hurdles to overcome when new tools are implemented. This proved not the case at the department because the staff with the necessary skills to use this new technology were already doing the work by answering phones and email. They just needed to continue what they were already doing but in a new user-friendly system that collected all of their communications in one place. Within a couple of days, they were functioning as if they had been there for years. 

Understandably, employees became a little concerned about a customer​ engagement tool that tracked and recorded every conversation, whether it was a phone call, email, or chat. However, they initially missed an important point. When had they ever been given credit for that work? Normal employee performance plans are built around the output, and in government this meant how many claims were they producing. The performance never focused on the effort exerted to produce the claim to full resolution. This solution allowed for staff to be recognized for "all" the work that went into producing a resolved claim for benefits. This created a culture of trust among employees with management on this digital first solution. This also proved​ to be a great tool for training agents on how to handle specific situations with customers. 

 

IV

It’s All About the Data

All Government Policies and Procedures Should Be Evidence Based

Before Zendesk, when the department used a proprietary interactive voice response (IVR) system, chat, and web forms, none of which were connected, the idea of being able to scrub data, much less provide real-time KPI information, was out of reach.

However, after implementing Zendesk a significant degree of digital transformation​ in the department happened in just a few short months. This digital first solution immediately began to track the customer journey and each touch point it contained. Whether it was where a customer traveled on our site, when they came to a point where they asked for help, what search terms they used in seeking help and even what type device they used to submit their request.

Not only were there many cost benefits to one solution, but also the amount of data upon which our division leaders and managers could make informed decisions on policy, resource allocation and direction was abundant.

After the implementation of Zendesk we began to collect the following:

• A record every interaction a constituent had with the department
• The subject matter the constituent contacted the department about
• From where and by what means a constituent contacted the agency
• The time of every interaction, whether a few seconds or many minutes
• If a constituent called but held for but a few seconds
• A transcription and recording of every conversation
• How long it took for us to respond to every constituent
• The number of exchanges involving questions and answers it took to answer a question or resolve an issue
• If the constituent was satisfied with the service received

Through the use of communications provided in the omni-channel solution the department was able to gather necessary information that was previously unattainable. The customers information proved to be a guide to the direction we should go to make changes that would ultimately reduce over 85% of the workload. The result was an increase in production capacity in resolving unemployment insurance claims.

This gave management the data needed to identify root causes and make informed decisions on actions necessary to eliminate them. It also provided information that enabled the creation of new processes to track results with real-time data to make sure they could be sustained. The data collected enabled the department to​ optimize workflows, create custom metrics and identify gaps in service.

Senior management was able to gain the trust of the employees with the decision to move forward to a full digital transformation. All the while, providing savings in costs to the overall process of producing claims.

Communication Always On​

We had moved from paper to digital processes, eliminated spreadsheets, and were​ collecting an enormous amount of data that helped us know and better understand our customers. ​ It was extremely important that this information be communicated​ to management and their staff. ​ We​ began to use TV monitors to communicate real​ time customer data and employee performance. 

TV monitors? That’s right. We ​connected every division of the department. We​ wanted a way to communicate the data and information we collected through Zendesk to our senior staff and their staff on a real time basis, just as we were collecting it.

We placed inexpensive monitors combined with an open source product, on the office walls of each assistant commissioner and at other locations throughout the building (Figures A and B). 

 

Figure A

This provided them with a continual flow of information that told them with a glance at any moment of the day how their unit and the unit’s personnel were performing, according to the customer.

 

Figure B

Like a canary in a coal mine. If there was trouble the dashboard told us ‘real time’ so the root cause could be identified, and action taken in a most timely manner. 

This can be accomplished in a short time frame and can be utilized in any organization that communicates with customers. A recipe of a few new digital tools, and a passion from management to create a high-powered workplace is all that is needed. 

Customer Success Team

In October 2016 we established a Customer Success Team which handled ​all​ incoming communications for the department. This team​ became the core of our​ integrated system. 

Tier 1 of this team was comprised of people that were our “first line of contact” with the public. It was unique in its members, organization and training.

• Team members were hired from temp agencies
• They were taught how to use the software in a day
• Shadowed another agent for the second day
• Learn the scripts and were told to: Never say no, never make up an answer, ever!

In two days, maybe three, they are effectively engaging our customers with tools (software and knowledge base) that enable them to work as seasoned employees in 2-3 days. 

There is significant turnover here but they either move up in the organization, get a better job elsewhere or get asked to leave. It is effectively our incubator for talented employees. 

If you’re thinking, that sounds like a recipe for disaster, note this. Their Customer Satisfaction rating is consistently in the 90 percentiles!

Customer Satisfaction – The Ultimate Metric

Two metrics that were of utmost importance to us, and in keeping with the governor’s ​ emphasis on​ ​ providing the public the highest level of service at the lowest cost, were efficiency and effectiveness. We measured efficiency by how quickly we responded to tickets from first reply to full resolution. The measurement for effectiveness was how many interactions it took for our team to resolve the ticket, what we referred to as OneTouch tickets. A OneTouch ticket was one where a customer's question or request was satisfied on the first contact with the department.

A third metric and the one we considered the most important was customer satisfaction (CSAT). In our opinion it is the singular metric that indicates whether you are performing at a high level. 

The system enabled us to automatically contact a customer after their customer service ticket was solved and gather feedback on whether they were satisfied with the service provided, yes or no. They could elaborate on the specifics of their answer if they chose.

Integration of Other Tools with Zendesk

We realized quickly that Zendesk was extremely flexible and compatible with the integration of a huge number of other tools that could enhance and expand its functionality and benefits. We saw it as more than just a customer service system. It was a business management tool that measured efficiency, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. Great customer service was just a byproduct.

We not only sought other innovative applications of Zendesk products, but also third-party tools that might integrate with that solution. This proved particularly helpful in IT service management; specifically, project management, timekeeping and employment access management, areas where we needed to do a better job.

V

Tell Your Truth or Somebody Will Tell It for You

A Valuable Unforeseen Benefit

For government agencies there are many masters. Of course, there is the public they serve. Then there is the chief elected official, in our case, the governor of the state of Tennessee. Next, and probably the most frustrating, rewarding and often unreasonable, is the legislature.

Of all the benefits our department and our customers realized from our digital transformation and adoption of Zendesk, there was one that proved invaluable to the department and its employees. The ability to track and document every ‘touch’ a customer had with the department and every service they were provided. 

Constituents are quick to contact their legislators if they feel they have not received satisfactory service from a state agency. The stories they tell their legislators are more often than not, an embellished and incorrect representation of reality that reflects poorly on the state agency.

Our OneTouch system, anchored with Zendesk, created a complete record of every step, touch and word of a customer’s journey through our system. If a constituent told their legislator that they had called 50 times, held for four hours, finally got through and were then treated shabbily, our record spoke to reality. We were able to show that the constituent called only twice, held for no more than 20 seconds and were themselves the disrespectful party in the conversation with an agent.   

 

CONCLUSION

Business exists because it provides products or services to their customers, the consumer. Government exists for the same reason, to provide products or services to its customers, the citizens. The customer is their commonality and today, for both, the customer is different than ever before. Today they want omnichannel access, quick resolution with seamless transactions and consistently personal service, yet with a high degree of self-service readily available. One unsatisfactory experience with a business and they’re off to a competitor or, in the case of a government agency, they’re on the phone to their elected official telling them ‘Your story’.

The demands of 21^st century customers are continuing to evolve with the unrelenting evolution and disruption of digital technologies and the increased volume, transparency, and availability of information they bring. The customer’s needs and demands are today, a rapidly moving target. There has never been a time when knowing one’s customers was more important.

Business and government must move away from the traditional organizational structure. They must become ‘agile’ if they are to remain relevant to the customer, both internal and external. They must be customer centric and data driven. Able to gather customer information as close to real time as possible, make that available to empowered employees that work in an environment of trust, responsibility and accountability that use that as their guide for quick decisions and the allocation and mobilization of resources. 

This can only happen if the program is structured on a digital tool that provide platforms for hearing customers, measuring their experience, and providing real time feedback.