3 Things Government Can Learn From The Private Sector

Chuck Brooks — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 09:00:00 -0400

There’s money to be saved, and federal government agencies are taking a look at their customer contact centers. There are too many of these centers, and they don’t always work together very well. That adds up to costs.

Consolidation is an obvious solution. Technology has evolved to ensure continued customer satisfaction, and mitigate risks to programs and projects that require real-time responses. The transformation has begun at many agencies in the federal government. The quality, effectiveness, and speed of service are changing with the development and deployment of new technologies, agile processes, and training for customer service agents.

To speed consolidation, planners at many federal agencies are looking at commercial best practices. The metrics from the private sector — based on proven consistency, efficiency and quality of services — show the way for more predictable allocations of capital resources for budget planning. Here are three important takeaways that federal agencies can use.

Make It Scalable
The way to doing more with less in an era of government belt-tightening is to adapt scalable service desk operations to meet the complexity and diversity in an agency’s core objectives. Many federal agencies have dozens of help desks operating independently across various states. For example, the Department of Interior has 71,000 employees receiving technical support from over 50 dispersed help desks. They are now planning consolidation – with the intent that many of these operations can be fulfilled virtually and implemented with fewer contact centers. This is a cost-savings and return on investment opportunity that is gradually being recognized by agencies throughout government.

Automate and Assimilate
Because of recent IT advances, (specifically with cloud alternatives) customer contact centers can now be automated and assimilated into enterprise service desk platforms that use multi-channel contact tools such as phone, email, text, Web, mobile devices, or through self-service tools and agent assisted responses. These virtual analytics tools make the agents’ jobs easier by simplifying and augmenting their capabilities to respond to customer needs. With improving software, agencies can now monitor, track progress of tickets, and analyze end-user customer satisfaction to a degree that was not possible in the past.

Always Improve
In conjunction with technology tools, standardized and continuous improvement processes are an integral part of optimizing service desk solutions. Agents are a major component of this change management. Creating a culture of collaboration while hiring and training technically savvy customer service agents are paramount for success. Incentivizing the agents with performance rewards is also important, because a happy agent means a happy customer.

Reliability, quality and cost-savings are integral to federal contact center mission objectives. The consolidation trend can be fulfilled with commercial metrics, new technology offerings, and the best processes and people.

Charles (Chuck) brooks serves as Vice President/Client executive for the Department of Homeland Security at Xerox. He has extensive experience in executive management, government relations, and R & D in the public and private sectors.

]]>

What You Can Learn from Public/Private Partnerships

Chuck Brooks — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 16:17:00 -0400

The Internet was invented in a government laboratory, but it was the corporate vision that had it commercialized and institutionalized. It’s a great example of how the public and private sectors can work as partners in innovation, and advance a new era of social and technological change.

The best part: Both sides win.

These types of partnerships can fail as spectacularly as they succeed. But to make a partnership successful and work faster, smarter and better, a few things have to happen. These can also be applied outside of the public/private space.

Collaborate

Stakeholders will simplify operations if they share information. Administrative complexity and technological redundancy can be your biggest bugaboos. For example, when government and private stakeholders share information – and risk – the resulting innovation can benefit key areas that include homeland/national security, health and human services, energy, public safety and transportation.

Share Best Practices

Don’t reinvent the wheel. For public/private projects, private sector companies offer a playbook for successful innovation through lessons-learned and best practices. They can balance costs and benefits — a skill learned from the necessity of competitive markets where budgets are connected to solutions. Government agencies can tap this experience to identify products, evaluate gaps in technology or design flexible solutions that promote positive change.

Tap Into Existing R&D Resources

The sequestration and budget constraints have undermined the federal government’s research and development capabilities. Funding for R&D has shifted to rapid prototyping and procurement of “off the shelf” technologies and services. However, R&D spending in the private sector continues to move apace, because corporations must develop new technologies in order to be competitive.

Companies can help make up the government shortfalls by sharing their R&D capabilities. Combining funding and pipelines for research in the public and private sectors can also provide a sustainable, competitive bridge for the next generation of scientists and engineers who will lead and achieve.

Strengthening the public/private partnership through open collaboration, best practices, and shared research and development will help accelerate the innovation we need to meet our challenges. It’s not a nice-to-have: It’s an imperative if you want to be competitive in the U.S. and abroad.

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as vice president/client executive for the Department of Homeland Security at Xerox. He has an extensive experience in executive management, government relations, and R&D in the public and private sectors.

This post originally appeared in Forbes.

Image via alphaspirit/Shutterstock.com

]]>

Government Executive - Authors - Chuck Brooks

3 Things Government Can Learn From The Private Sector

What You Can Learn from Public/Private Partnerships