Public Sector Agencies Can Benefit From Oracle Service Cloud

I’m sure that at some point or another we have all played telephone, whether you meant to or not. Telephone is a game where one person tells another person something, and that person tells another, and so on. At the end of several people having done this, you compare it with what the original person said and see how close the last statement is.

A form of this still exists today. According to Oracle, there are growing inconsistencies between information that is being delivered over the Web, what call center representatives tell constituents and what the agencies publish in documents and communicate in email messages. The more sources of information there are, the more varied the answers become.

It seems that information specialists are spending a lot more of their time on editorial tasks, such as synchronizing content delivered across call center, the Internet and email. This, unfortunately, leaves very few resources to develop new information that addresses constituents’ concerns.

Oracle believes that it has created a better way by building a constituent facing contact center, which is organized around a shared knowledge base. In this respect, all of the information would be uniform and consistent. Oracle feels that it is essential to develop the content once, manage it in a systematic fashion and distribute it across the multiple channels for constituent communications.

The solution that Oracle has come up with is Oracle RightNow, its cloud service. By unifying Internet, social and call center experiences and providing a solution in the cloud, a company can achieve content consistent, cross-channel solutions. This, in turn, enables a public agency to better serve constituents, reduce costs and improve effectiveness. Oracle Service Cloud provides a shared source for all information an agency distributes, which is stored centrally and indexed by a predefined set of keywords.

This is an ongoing process. The way in which the information from the shared knowledge base is used and accessed is constantly being monitored. This means that the agency information specialists can make adjustments, as well as updates just once. At that point, the changes are distributed across all of the channels used, including mobile devices and all the information remains consistent.

We live in a world where just about everyone is always connected, whether it is through a mobile device or sitting at your desk on a computer. Companies are allowing employees the use of BYOD, so this group is accessing information from various points throughout the day on a variety of devices. Everyone has access to information through the Internet, which needs to remain accurate and consistent.

The following are three instances where public agencies deployed Oracle Service Cloud to meet their expectations;

1. The Illinois Department of Revenue is able to answer hundreds of common questions on the web 24 hours a day, and slashed its email volume by 83 percent. The system paid for itself within six months. 

1. The US Air Force raised its constituent satisfaction levels from “poor” to “very good”:

• Average constituent inquiry times decreased from 20 to 2 minutes
• Weekly utilization of web knowledge base increased from 180,000 to 2 million hits
• The agency consolidated 21 personnel programs into the new web-based knowledge management service
• Better program management led to significant cost reductions 

1. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports a 98 percent self-service rate on its web site. Agency staff tracks trends about hot topics through interactive dashboards. Furthermore, CBP personnel gather feedback from constituents, and directly respond to comments and recommendations through the contact center.

A government agency requires both performance and budget results. Deploying a constituent-facing contact center leads to greater effectiveness and substantial cost savings.

The groups that can really take advantage of this type of scenario are companies that initially created a website about 10 years ago. In most instances, while changes have been made, the structure of these first generation websites have remained the same. This makes them difficult to maintain, as well as being costly. Unfortunately, since people have come to rely on these sites, they need to exist.

As a cloud-powered solution, Oracle Service Cloud is an environment that any agency can rapidly adopt on a predictable time scale and more importantly, on a budget that is affordable. There are no upfront capital expenses required to procure the underlying infrastructure and enterprise software systems. An agency budgets and funds the service as an operational expense, which makes it much easier to maintain.

Oracle feels that the building, as well as the maintenance of a successful knowledge base no longer has to be a long and drawn out complicated experience. No longer are specialists needed, requiring as much time as they can have to gather your information into a usable database. Oracle Consulting has the tools, resources, along with the expertise to help a public agency organize its information for a constituent facing contact center. This can be accomplished in a matter of weeks, maintained on an ongoing basis and deliver content across multiple channels.

Edited by Maurice Nagle