In today’s budget environment, it’s more important than ever for agencies to find efficiencies while reducing costs. AI, automation and other emerging technologies can help government organizations simultaneously enhance productivity while improving the constituent experience.
Today, government organizations across the board are looking for ways to improve efficiency, build trust and reliably deliver essential government services. One way to achieve these goals and more is to improve the contact center experience for constituents.
Instead of the typical reactivity of contact center operations where we think about the amount of inbound calls we receive, we are instead pushing government leaders to think about systems that orchestrate the entire customer journey.
Sam Frederick, Senior Director, Customer Experience Solutions
Maximus
Learn more about how Maximus and AWS can help your organization revolutionize contact center customer experience strategy.
Revolutionizing Government Contact Centers
IMMERSIVE ARTICLE
Enhancing government customer experience (CX) is not just about providing satisfactory interactions. While positive experiences with government services help to build trust, negative experiences can quickly erode it. In addition to strengthening trust, streamlining user-friendly customer experiences can reduce inefficiencies. For example, a smoother contact center journey can minimize errors and staff intervention, ultimately lowering operational costs.
“Contact centers represent a critical interface between government agencies and the citizens they serve, making them a key focus in modernization efforts,” said Greg Smith, specialist solution architect for Amazon Connect at AWS US-Public Sector.
Today, federal agencies are still challenged with legacy contact center systems that struggle to meet the evolving expectations of citizens who demand seamless, omni-channel interactions and swift resolution of their queries. By prioritizing contact center modernization, agencies can leverage cutting-edge technologies to automate processes, reduce wait times, and provide more personalized and effective services.
“Modernization not only improves the citizen experience but also enables agencies to gather valuable insights, optimize resource allocation, and quickly adapt to changing citizen and mission needs,” said Smith.
The rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI), automation and other technologies, alongside the right expertise and industry partners, can help government organizations revolutionize their contact center and constituent experiences for the better — and for the long term.
The importance of enhancing citizen experience
"Contact centers represent a critical interface between government agencies and the citizens they serve, making them a key focus in modernization efforts."
Greg Smith,
Specialist Solution Architect
for Amazon Connect,
AWS US-Public Sector
“Many government processes rely on collecting and processing information to make decisions,” said Sam Frederick, senior director of Customer Experience Solutions at Maximus. AI and automation can take some of those processes, such as repetitive data collection tasks, off human agents’ plates so they can focus on deeper, more complex interactions with constituents.
For example, Maximus is working alongside government leaders to help agencies introduce AI with the aim of automating the information-gathering parts of benefit calls. Prior to transferring to a human agent, natural language processing (NLP) leverages human understanding and automation to route the call appropriately, providing the agent with key constituent information before they even connect with the caller.
“Introducing automation is about trying to reduce the overall undifferentiated heavy lifting of those mundane, repeatable interactions,” said Frederick.
These technologies minimize the amount of time the employee has to spend on the phone while maximizing their impact by ensuring they’re available to review the information with the beneficiary and answer any questions.
Leveraging AI and automation
Not only can emerging technologies modernize current experiences and interactions, they can also help leverage insights and analytics to enable an approach that is more proactive than reactive to customer needs. Reversing the traditional approach, organizations can anticipate needs and initiate targeted outreach, providing timely support and clear guidance before issues arise.
“We're starting to work a lot with agencies around implementing proactive outbound engagement. So, instead of the typical reactivity of contact center operations where we think about the amount of inbound calls we receive, we are pushing government leaders to think about systems that orchestrate the entire customer journey and to ensure we can reach the right person at the right time and connect them with the right resources on their preferred channel,” said Frederick.
The idea is to flip the script when it comes to customer experience. Rather than placing the strain on citizens to navigate complex processes — often resulting in confusion and errors — outreach efforts enable agencies to get ahead of constituent needs.
This includes tactics like outbound texting, which allows agencies to reach out to constituents when they may be eligible for services and help guide them to the right information or set up a call with a customer service representative to set aside a time to answer their questions.
“We call this approach CX Next-Gen — building mission-driven contact centers that go beyond just technology,” Frederick said, to collecting and leveraging insights that drive actionable intelligence. For example, flagging key data signals such as missed deadlines can help agencies identify when a constituent may be at risk for more serious issues.
“The goal is to use that data proactively to help governments identify policy and outreach decisions that achieve mission outcomes,” Frederick said.
Proactive outreach and customer journey orchestration
As government organizations begin their journeys toward more effective, efficient and user-friendly CX, they need more than just reliable technologies: Strong strategies and expert vendor partners are essential to helping them make their ideas a reality.
This is where partners like Maximus and Amazon Web Services can step in. The partnership represents a synergistic collaboration that combines AWS's cutting-edge cloud technology with Maximus's deep expertise in government operations and citizen services.
AWS brings to the table its vast array of cloud services, including Amazon Connect, which forms the technological foundation for modern contact centers. Their scalable infrastructure, advanced analytics, and AI capabilities provide the tools necessary for transformative solutions.
Maximus provides its extensive experience in managing complex government programs focused on citizen services and its intimate understanding of agency workflows and regulatory requirements. This domain knowledge allows Maximus to effectively tailor AWS solutions to the specific needs of government agencies, ensuring compliance and maximizing impact.
“Together, this partnership offers agencies a powerful combination of innovative technology and strategic implementation expertise, accelerating their digital transformation journey while mitigating risks associated with large-scale modernization efforts,” said Smith.
“The result is a more efficient, cost-effective, and citizen-centric approach to contact center operations and service delivery.”
Partnerships for success
Government contact centers are also finding ways to use AI to maximize the information they have in other channels — including paper documents — to be more efficient and proactive about data collection and customer outreach.
By tapping into a process called intelligent document processing, or IDP, agencies are automating the processing of manual data entry from paper-based documents or document images to integrate with other digital processes.
Maximus’s Veterans Evaluation Services (VES) has tapped AI and IDP to accelerate application processing to help get veterans answers about their benefits eligibility faster than ever before.
The challenge for VES was that many of the millions of records submitted by service members daily were from legacy systems, or even physical filing cabinets, and while many have been digitized, they were often unstructured and hard to access.
Maximus implemented AWS tools to build an IDP production system that parses and extracts key data from these documents, integrates it into case management systems, and adds search functionality to help agents quickly find relevant information. This ensures veterans get the services they need — and are entitled to — faster and more reliably.
Maximus is also exploring how to integrate this workload with VES’s contact center to enable human-in-the-loop document review.
“The idea is to use AI and automation to process and route documents automatically to backend systems without human involvement, but if the system has a low confidence score or flags something missing, we can trigger a task through Amazon Connect for an agent to manually review the document. If needed, the agent can even follow up directly with the individual, all enabled by the technology,” explained Frederick.
Amazon Connect and other AWS tools are enabling government organizations to transform their contact centers into comprehensive, cloud-based solutions that address multiple pain points. Amazon Connect provides a flexible, scalable application that enables agencies to rapidly deploy and manage contact center operations with minimal upfront investment.
Its AI-powered features, such as NLP and sentiment analysis, enhance the quality of interactions and enable more efficient routing of inquiries. Native integration of chatbots, allows agencies to create omnichannel experiences that cater to diverse citizen preferences by using agentic AI to enable more conversational and context-aware interactions, improving the overall citizen experience.
With Amazon Lex, agencies can build their own AI chatbots, while Amazon Bedrock provides the ability for agencies to build and scale their own generative AI models, which can help to pull answers from knowledge bases and handle routine FAQs.
Additionally, AWS's robust analytics capabilities empower agencies to gain actionable insights from contact center data, facilitating continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making.
To facilitate IDP, Amazon Textract provides optical character recognition that allows agencies to parse documents. Meanwhile, Amazon Comprehend extracts key details like names and dates of birth.
“This holistic approach not only modernizes the technical infrastructure but also enables agencies to reimagine and optimize their entire citizen engagement strategy,” said Smith.
Transforming contact centers with cloud-based solutions
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"[A] holistic approach not only modernizes the technical infrastructure but also enables agencies to reimagine and optimize their entire citizen engagement strategy."
Greg Smith
Specialist Solution Architect, Amazon Connect
AWS US-Public Sector
Government is, understandably, a risk-averse industry, and while many of these improvements may sound exciting, it’s also understandable that organizations with tight budgets and important, uninterruptible missions may hesitate to make changes unless absolutely necessary.
To make the most of both updates and budgets, government organizations can leverage outcome-based contracting, in which agencies structure their contracts to pay partners based on the actual impact or outcome of the modernization.
“This approach allows Maximus to provide the people, processes and technology to help achieve an outcome,” Frederick said. “If we do well on that outcome, it's good for the government and it's good for Maximus, but it also puts the risk on our shoulders to deliver the innovation.”
Ultimately, this type of model helps government organizations partner most effectively with vendors so both can keep delivering thoughtful, innovative customer experiences that are mission aligned and adaptable to meet the changing environment.
“It helps government meet its requirements, but it incentivizes us to modernize and innovate, as well, not only for our new customers, but for our existing customers and government agencies that we support,” said Frederick.
Performance-based contracting
