
Digital engagement
If your organization is still offering only voice and email support, that's a CX gap you should focus on closing. Today's consumers (your constituents) expect to be able to communicate with organizations through digital channels such as online chat, social media, social messaging, and text (SMS). Research from our Customer Experience Transformation Benchmark found that half of consumers expect companies to allow them to interact via private social messaging apps.
Further research shows the following:

Keys to success for going digital and fulfilling customer expectations
- Implementing integrated channels. Sometimes when organizations implement digital channels, they use a best-of-breed or lowest-cost approach. This can result in using one vendor for chat, another for social media, a third for email, etc. If the systems don't integrate well, this creates silos that limit the agent’s ability to see the entire customer journey and prevent contact centers from optimizing digital-first customer experiences. A best practice that avoids this pitfall is to implement a fully integrated digital channel solution offered by a single cloud vendor.
- Providing a unified agent desktop. Offering multiple channels creates an opportunity to increase agent efficiency through multi-skilling. With the right technology, a single agent could end a phone conversation, then handle two simultaneous chat sessions, while having three customer emails waiting for her in her inbox. This can be difficult for agents to manage without a unified agent desktop that contains everything an agent needs to support multiple channels and personalize interactions.

- Aim for cross-channel consistency. Offering digital channels in addition to phone support greatly benefits customers and operations, but it also adds complexity to customer experience management. When designing your agency's digital-first experiences, make sure they are consistent with other channel experiences. For example: A customer should get the same resolution regardless of whether they walk into one of your offices, call your service center, use your IVR self-service, interact with a chatbot, or converse with an agent on social media. Inconsistency diminishes the benefits of implementing digital channels.
Self-service
Does your contact center handle a high amount of basic, repetitive interactions? If so, then you have a great opportunity for customer self-service options. Most private sector businesses have implemented self-service solutions for tasks such as password resets, appointment scheduling, and account balance inquiries, and there are similar opportunities for public agencies to move some of their volume to self-service as well.If encouraging your constituents to solve their own problems seems to contradict improving the customer experience, consider this statistic: 81% of customers try to solve their own problems before contacting a live agent. By implementing effective self-service solutions, you're actually making it easier for customers to succeed at what they're already attempting. That's what improving CX is all about.Shifting repetitive tasks to self-service is also good for agent morale. Being inundated with tedious, repetitive activities all day affects morale and makes it difficult for agents to concentrate on more complex interactions. Plus, those simple interactions eat up valuable agent capacity at a time when contact centers can't afford to be wasteful.
- Streamlined, searchable knowledge bases: Have you ever searched for something on a company's website and, frustratingly, been presented with a long list of results of which none was exactly what you were looking for? Not all knowledge management systems are created equal, but the most effective ones assist your constituents by answering common questions without a laundry list of irrelevant topics to sift through. Even better, your agents can also leverage the knowledge base to provide customers with consistent answers across all channels.
- Conversational IVR (Interactive Voice Response): The right IVR can also access knowledge bases, but is capable of much more than answering questions. A smart, conversational IVR enables your constituents to voice their needs naturally (no pressing 1 for anything). It also facilitates transactions such as checking the status of benefits and changing an address. With the ability to quickly make configuration changes, an IVR empowers agencies to react swiftly to disruptions such as hurricanes and worldwide pandemics.
- Chatbots: Chatbots come with a variety of capabilities ranging from simple, menu-driven bots to AI-powered virtual agents This allows agencies to design and deploy a chatbot that meets requirements specific to their mission and constituents. The University of Arizona is an example of a public entity that successfully uses a chatbot for interactions. Students can text questions about the FAFSA process to the Ask Benji bot and receive answers regarding topics such as application deadlines and more.
Enhancing agent engagement and performance in remote environments
As your organization probably experienced recently, a large majority of agents transitioned to a work-from-home setup. It’s likely many of them want to continue working remotely.Private sector businesses see the value of a work from home agent model. It improves work/life balance and has become an important component of business continuity plans. As a result, 70% of businesses plan to continue allowing at least a portion of their agents to work remotely. Gartner predicts that 35% of the customer experience (CX) workforce will be work from home by 2023, up from 5% in 2017. Although there are many benefits to a remote agent model, it can create some challenges. As with any remote worker, at-home agents can feel disconnected from the organization and their team if the contact center doesn't implement specific preventative measures. Additionally, supervisors who can no longer use a "walk the floor" management style need tools that help them monitor and develop agents.
- Collaboration tools: Deloitte research revealed that "40% of employees say digital collaboration platforms are the top factor for sustainable remote work."

- Real-time interaction guidance: Real-time interaction guidance software gives supervisors a helping hand by enabling them to coach agents on soft skills as voice interactions happen.
- Aligning roles, responsibilities, and performance with business goals: ICMI found that this is the number one contributor to high engagement levels.
- Gamification. Gamification helps make hitting performance targets fun and engaging, and when you add team goals to the mix, it can increase a sense of connection between agents.