through Unified Communications (UC)
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Learn how Mitel can support governments in delivering exceptional citizen experiences.
Enhancing Citizen Experience
Contents:
Section 1:
Next
Back
The Evolution and Importance of Citizen Experience in the Public Sector
Section 2:
How UC Can Transform Citizen Engagement
Section 3:
Elevating Citizen Experience with UC from Mitel
Section 4:
How Do You Start to Build a UC Strategy for Citizen Experience?
Section 5:
What’s Next for Your Citizens?
1
The advent of citizen experience is helping to drive digital transformation across the whole public sector. But to fully realize its benefits, organizations must act now – designing and implementing a future-ready UC platform that can keep up with citizens’ evolving needs.
Traditional Citizen-Government Interactions
Government entities are facing increasingly high demands and expectations from the public about citizen experience and the services they provide. Citizens now expect the same high-quality experiences they’re used to receiving from businesses in the banking, retail, and hospitality sectors. And they expect them to be delivered over familiar channels of communication. But it’s clear there’s a disconnect. About 70% of surveyed government managers feel that their customer service is equal in quality to what citizens might expect from the private sector. Yet, citizens rank the government far behind other industries.
The new age of digital connectivity is significantly improving access to essential services by reducing long queues, tedious paperwork, and bureaucratic processes. There’s now a drive for seamless citizen experiences, focusing on accessibility and self-service. But there are complications to navigate before this can be accomplished, including reinforced legal and security standards and increasingly restricted resources. To start their journey towards better citizen experiences, public entities must collaborate with technology suppliers to overcome these challenges.
60% of residents report a strong preference for digital channels, compared with 30% for phone and 27% for in-person.
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The Shift to Digital Citizen Engagement
Public service departments recognize the need to create meaningful connections between citizens and their public servants. And while challenging, it is possible. User-centric design and personalized solutions can equip you with the tools required to address diverse constituent needs. Allowing citizens to easily pay taxes, renew licenses, and access vital information whenever they want from their own devices. Empowering citizens while saving time, money, and resources.
Current Challenges in Citizen Experience
The digital divide continues to remain a concern for governments. Marginalized communities and individuals may lack the resources or technical skills to engage with online platforms, while language barriers pose an obstacle to ensuring equal access for non-native speakers. Additionally, government bureaucracy can often be overwhelming and confusing for citizens, even within a digital framework.
More than half (53%) of citizens in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific said accessing public services is frustrating, while only one-third (36%) find government processes and interactions intuitive.
To get things right, you need to find a balance within communication channels when addressing these challenges.
To meet the expectations of digitally empowered citizens, and provide robust data privacy and cybersecurity, governments must modernize operations – embracing emerging technologies and enhancing digital services. UC enables them to engage citizens through their preferred channels across self-service and human-assisted service modes.
UC provides a range of other benefits:
of Australians now prefer to access government information via digital channels.
Seamless Multichannel Communication
You must be ready to communicate flexibly – meeting citizens wherever they are, via phone, email, SMS, or web chat. Multi-channel communication systems give citizens the ability to choose how they’re contacted, while ensuring the public sector keeps pace with their evolving expectations and the increasing desire for self-service.
65% of citizens prefer to interact with government services through multiple channels, including online, in-person, and over the phone.
Real-time Interaction and Response
Meeting your citizens where they are is just part of the story – you must also meet citizens at the right time. UC places agents and citizens in the same ecosystem, ensuring queries receive real-time engagement with humans when chatbots will not suffice – elevating overall customer satisfaction.
Enhanced Collaboration and Information Sharing
A UC system allows departments to work together to quickly and seamlessly access accurate information, driving more efficient service delivery and improving citizen experiences. When integrated with other apps, government portals, or platforms, a UC solution can also increase productivity – saving time and costs.
59% of Australian citizens are unclear as to how long it will take to satisfy their request for information.
Leveraging Data for Personalization
Just like the private sector, governments must provide data-driven, personalized services for citizens. By monitoring and analyzing data, you can use it to inform decisions and workflows. You can also use this data to create personalized interactions and tailored services that match the unique needs of individual citizens.
Enabling Mass Notification
Mass notifications technology enables you to message an entire community or target affected areas with clear instructions in an emergency. Notifications can be delivered across a wide range of devices, including SMS on mobile and recorded calls on landlines. This means citizens and emergency response times will be alerted as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Anticipating Citizen Needs
Accessibility and Inclusivity
You can analyze citizen’s communication patterns and trends using UC technology. This helps to proactively resolve queries without human interaction, ensuring potential issues are addressed ahead of time.
Citizens and employees with disabilities or specific needs are just as reliant on digital services as other citizens – making it crucial for governments to implement diverse communication channels and adaptable interfaces. By utilizing omnichannel UC solutions, you can ensure that services are accessible to every citizen, regardless of their needs or technological literacy.
56%
A comprehensive, feature-rich, and deployment-flexible communications, collaboration, and contact center platform.
Mitel has a broad range of future-ready UC solutions that can solve citizen engagement challenges – boosting user experience and operational efficiency, while maintaining digital security and compliance.
Mitel’s UC Solutions
MiVoice Business:
An all-in-one application for audio conferencing, video conferencing, and collaboration.
MiCollab:
High-quality call recording and monitoring to elevate the citizen experience.
Mitel Workforce Optimization:
A multichannel contact center platform to enhance the citizen journey and keep team members productive and engaged.
MiContact Center:
A fast, effective, and reliable communication notification solution to help modern governments keep every citizen safe, informed, and connected in emergencies.
Mass notifications:
We also provide professional services, training, and support options that can help deliver better citizen experiences and greater engagement. These include:
• System design and installation • Third-party and advanced integrations • User, advanced user, and admin training
• Customer support, bug fixes, and new-release rollouts • Real-time software and cybersecurity updates
Mitel has extensive experience in helping governments worldwide to digitally transform with the power of UC. Explore examples of just a few of the organizations we’ve helped below.
Learn How Others Have Elevated Their Citizen Experience with Mitel
City of Baltimore
North Yorkshire County Council
City of Marseille
City of Hasselt
As the 29th largest city in the US, the City of Baltimore employs over 14,000 people across more than 60 agencies and departments, including Health, Public Safety, Public Works, Recreation and Parks, Transportation, Schools, and Government.
The Ambition
The city had an outdated and limited communications system, and its lack of features hampered business activities and processes. Even small changes required onsite technicians to visit a physical location and could take up to five days to complete. Despite the high volume of voice communications across each agency, the city faced invoices for thousands of low and no-usage lines – meaning it was paying for unused services. The city required a secure, scalable, in-house communications system that its internal staff could control and maintain, and which could keep pace with changing physical and technological needs.
The Solution >
The Solution
Mitel supported the City of Baltimore by implementing:
Mitel provided a UC platform to increase collaboration across teams and connect government departments for improved information sharing.
Enhanced Collaboration and Information Sharing:
Mitel’s MiContact Center solution provided a robust call center platform able to support the city’s 13 call centers and 450 agents.
Seamless Multi-Channel Communication:
The Result >
< The Ambition
The Result
The city now has a centralized and fully scalable VoIP system that’s supporting over 20,000 devices and helping to significantly reduce operational expenditure. It has reduced carrier costs by 75%, saving thousands of dollars, and returned a yearly cost avoidance of $2 million based on a 12-year TCO. Additionally, its feature-rich UC platform from Mitel provides essential services to staff, constituents, and the public, which proved invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic.
< The Solution
Mitel is always looking to provide solutions that innovate, create value for customers, and help build relationships.
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Simon Etta, Director of the Department of Telecommunications, City of Baltimore, and MUG Board Member
As the largest county in England, North Yorkshire County Council has over 600,000 citizens to serve. The county was already using Mitel MiContact Center Business and wanted an integrated chatbot to lower the burden on IT staff and improve efficiency.
A small IT team from North Yorkshire County Council handled all incident tickets from 7,000 users. Employees waited on hold or used web forms, which impacted productivity, while agents faced a high volume of non-urgent calls. A chatbot solution was desired to free up human agents and improve operational efficiency. Allowing the IT team to respond to more complex requests, while also extending service support outside of normal working hours.
Mitel supported the North Yorkshire County Council by implementing:
The Virtual Agent escalates complex queries to a live IT agent when needed.
The Virtual Agent chatbot provides automated responses to employees over web chat, enabling multi-channel self-service.
Instead of building a front end ourselves, we were able to bring in Mitel’s solution and very quickly set up a Google chatbot.
Human agents can now focus on more urgent, complex queries while the chatbot delivers real-time answers to routine IT requests without delay. This means the county can now provide a more efficient and cost-effective 24/7 service to its citizens.
John Kelly, Head of Data Intelligence, North Yorkshire County Council
The City of Marseille has a population of nearly one million, and its vast size added complexity to its communication needs. Its IT infrastructure was enormous, consisting of approximately 6,000 computers and as many telephone workstations spread over 300 sites – including city hall, sector town halls, local municipal offices, technical services, libraries, and museums. Some sites such as the police headquarters even required special security considerations.
The City of Marseille’s obsolete traditional phone system made its high call volumes difficult to manage. It also lacked collaboration tools, making managing communications across its 300 sites complex, and remote work difficult. The city wanted to modernize its telephony system through a two-step approach – an iso-functional migration, and the progressive addition of UC services. This required the replacement of legacy analog and digital phones with a new VoIP system and controller application that included functionality to manage employee mobility and collaboration needs.
Mitel supported the City of Marseille by implementing:
The MiCollab mobility and collaboration solution was implemented to support information sharing and teamwork across distributed teams and remote workers.
The city plans to evolve its call center to an omnichannel platform using Mitel’s MiContact Center and MiVoice solutions. This enables unified customer engagement across multiple channels and sites.
Mitel’s phone system has proven to be very robust. It has absorbed high traffic volumes, especially during COVID-19 periods.
Mitel’s solutions provided the city with the modern UC solution it needed to better support and respond to the needs of its citizens – even during times of unprecedented crisis.
Marc Cachau-Herreillat, IT Architect
Historically, the City of Hasselt had operated its government offices and social welfare departments as separate entities.
A new communications system was needed to centralize the organization, improve multiple functions, and better match the city’s CX goals. It already had a Mitel MiVoice 5000 phone system but wanted to integrate its legacy Alcatel PBX system with newer Mitel technology. The city required a future-proofed UC system that would allow the implementation of a customer contact center and provide integration with Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams to improve collaboration.
Mitel supported the City of Hasselt by implementing:
MiCollab UC fostered collaboration and remote work during COVID-19.
Mitel CloudLink provides web chat to enable real-time, omnichannel customer engagement.
We know we are only using about 60% of Mitel’s capabilities, so the technology has the scalability and agility we need as we grow or evolve.
Mitel solutions enabled rapid, efficient handling of inquiries by contact center agents for reliable communication routes that enhanced citizen satisfaction and experience.
Kris Vrancken, Telephony System Engineer, Hasselt Council
Start by defining your objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Think about what you want to achieve for your citizens and the challenges you must overcome to get there.
Examine your vendors and partnerships – have they already implemented unified communications systems for governments? You must understand if your existing suppliers can provide the exceptional UC tools needed to achieve your goals and integrate them with your existing systems.
In 2023, 80% of government digital implementations that do not build on a technology platform will fail to meet their objectives.
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Assess Your Current Communication Infrastructure
There are two paths you can take when choosing your route to a new UC system:
Path One:
Request for Proposal (RFP)
Path Two:
Check your vendor has been awarded a government contract such as Sourcewell (US) or Network Service 3 Framework (UK)
The traditional RFP process is designed to make competition fair between companies bidding for work – however, it includes challenges for governments and public sector institutions.
, the process can limit the quality of the responses you receive as top agencies may not respond and those that do may only apply a small amount of effort.
Firstly
, the process is time-consuming for the agency – with numerous steps that take a minimum of three to six months from RFP creation to installation.
Secondly
, using cooperative contracts through Sourcewell eliminates the challenges of traditional RFPs for governments as it conducts its own rigorous RFP process and awards national contracts. Agencies can also purchase directly through these contracts to save on months of work. Mitel has been awarded a contract by Sourcewell which accelerates our purchasing process, saving time and money for governments that work with us. It confirms our preferred status as a communications and collaboration provider for more than 50,000 government, education, and nonprofit organizations. Becoming a Sourcewell member is free and easy, and utilizing a cooperative purchasing agreement satisfies the most comprehensive bid requirements in less time.
In the US
, Mitel is a supplier of the Crown Commercial Service’s Network Service 3 Framework (RM6116) on the following lots:
In the UK
• 4b – Digital Communication Services (unified communications) • 4c – Contact Centre Solutions
The framework provides UK public sector organizations and their affiliates with a streamlined way to purchase cost-effective UC solutions from trusted suppliers. Speeding up access to experience-enhancing solutions for governments.
Look into the Future
When selecting the right UC technology, also consider how new, transformative technologies like AI, automation, and voice assistants could help shape future interactions with your citizens. These technologies can help you streamline processes further, minimize errors, and improve the overall quality of service delivery for a better citizen experience. Create a roadmap for implementation by working with your chosen vendor. This will allow you to continuously adapt and evolve the services you provide and how you provide them.
With the world becoming increasingly more digital and connected, it’s crucial that you stay ahead of the curve. As the leading communications provider for governments around the world, our aim is to help organizations connect, collaborate and provide innovative services that enhance communications and engagements. Our hands-on experience in driving citizen-focused digital transformation means we can offer flexible, affordable solutions that suit your organization’s specific needs. Optimizing your systems and operations, and revolutionizing experiences for your citizens.
Contact our team to explore the potential of a Mitel UC system for your government.
www.mitel.com/solutions/industry/government
Sources:
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/governments-can-deliver-exceptional-customer-experiences-heres-how
1. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/public-sector/current-state-of-government-cx.html
3. https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-report-finds-people-want-easy-to-use-government-customer-services.html
4. https://www.deloitte.com/au/en/Industries/technology/perspectives/blueprint-for-enhanced-citizen-experiences.html
6. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/government-cios-here-s-an-essential-piece-of-the-digital-transformation-puzzle:
5. https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/www/au/pdf/blueprint_for_enhanced_citizen_experiences_new.pdf
