Microsoft's DCCP & Copilot: Empowering government contact centres with generative AI

Okay, everybody. Just a warm welcome. We're just gonna be kicking off now. Just, we have an exciting webinar for you today with TTEC Digital and Microsoft. My name is Linda Mullin. I'm the marketing media lead here for TTEC Digital, and I'm thrilled to be kicking off today's session. Just before we begin, just some technical requirements and some housekeeping. A quick note that today's webinar is being recorded. If you miss anything or want to revisit the content later, we'll be happy to provide a recording of this session afterwards. Please be sure that you have a stable Internet connection, so for the best experience. We also request that everybody turns their Microsoft microphones off so as not to disturb. Questions can be submitted into the chat, and we will have a q and a session afterwards, if time allows. If you do submit a question and we don't have the time to answer, we will follow-up as well. If you encounter any technical difficulties, please put it into the chat, and we will try and remedy it for you as as fast as possible. For the best audio experience, we recommend using headphones. Please take a moment to check your microphones and your speaker settings. Engagement is vital for this. We do request that, you know, use emojis, put in questions into the chat. You know, this is a learning experience for everybody involved. So over to what we're talking about today. In today's digital age, AI is just not a buzzword anymore. It's a game changer, and its potential to revolutionize interactions with citizens, streamline operations, and enhance the overall efficiency of government call centers. Our webinar today aims to showcase practical insights on leveraging this power powerful tool effectively and efficiently. So we are joined today by Hila Gough, solutions specialist, business applications for central government, for Microsoft, James Fenton, business application specialist for central government for Microsoft, Mohit Satjiva, who is the director of TTEC Digital, and Dion Bardozi, who is, the senior principal sales consultant. So, now I hand this over to Mohit. Thank you, Linda. Welcome, everyone, and good afternoon. So, just to, give you a brief overview of the agenda today, we would cover very quickly around, what are the challenges the central government contact centers are facing, an overview of the Microsoft digital contact center platform, and how Microsoft and TTEC Digital can help overcome those challenges. Then Dan will demo the product with some large with some real world examples, and we'll be wrapping that up. What are the benefits the product and the technology delivers for the government, contact centers and a call to action? So, without, sort of kicking it off. So I think this is a statement which we we've kind of figured out, we've found on the cabinet office website. But let's kind of delve in delve deeper into this, statement and sort of look at, you know, if we are sitting at home and ordering a pizza or if we want to order a, you know, book a holiday, etcetera, that we can do all that, without stepping outside and most possibly, using a mobile phone or a tablet device. Now, however, in contrast, when we go into the realm of government services, while private sector has leaped forward, embracing the digital age, our interactions with government services are are being still very traditional and not are less efficient. So we need to probably email forms or call the contact center with long waiting queues, and the overall user experience is far from seamless, is far from seamless. So this disparity highlights a significant opportunity for innovation and transformation in how government services can be delivered. And it poses a critical question for us as well that how we can bridge this digital divide at at the extent of extending these online services to public sector, but also not leaving the vulnerable behind. So how we can use technology to make the process more efficient. So as we go on the webinar, we will kind of look at the challenges the citizen face, the challenges the leaders are facing, and how we overcome that using technology. So this is the vision of UK's government, for twenty twenty five. And the objective is very clear to create a digital government that creates a benchmark for excellence worldwide. They want to leverage cutting edge technology to provide services that are not just, you know, accessible, but also equitable. They want to ensure that no one's left behind at this stage lead forward. And the above all idea is to exceed the public expectations, but also not just doing the bare minimum, but delivering a superior experience that simplifies their procedures and processes as we go forward. Now, when we look at it from a, from a, citizen's perspective that what challenges currently the citizens are facing, we have to sort of look at, you know, in this digital experience, the citizens are kind of looking at outdated technology. So which is kind of keeping us, restricted to meet these modern expectations. Also the digital experience, their expectations are quite high in this digital age. Simple example is Amazon Prime, right? With the Amazon Prime, when it started the next day delivery. Now, if we go, if we go and buy anything of any retailer, we tend to expect a next day delivery. And I think that sort of expectation change has driven across all the services, not just commercial services. Then there's an issue of disconnected journey. You know, citizens have to go in a maze like path to look at what are the various services, they have to repeat the information time and again, and that can lead to frustration and not resolving issues, but also about reaching out to the right team that can basically there's too much information available. How do they navigate through that very, very quickly? And lastly, look at the operational and cost efficiencies as we need to optimize it, government has to optimize, but we also need to sharpen our operations as part of the aspect. Now how we define our services, the last is the feedback loop. How do we capture that important citizen feedback to keep adapting, keep listening and evolving based on what people tell us. Now we've kind of understood from a citizen's point of view, but also let's say what a citizen, you know, the leaders who have to deliver these citizen experiences, how, what they need to prepare for. They're addressing a twin challenge here. They've got high call volumes and they've got limited resources in their contact centers and in terms of, of funds. So government contact centers are frontline where the call volumes are often, you know, very high with longer lead times. And when our citizens are looking for timely assistance, they're met with delays and, you know, which can sort of undermine trust. Now to combat this, a lot of government and and this is part by even by personally using information. I've seen there's a there's a multichannel strategy that has been implemented using mobile apps, social media, and contact center. However, aim is just not to make it accessible, but also make it reliable and connected across all platforms. So how do we create a proactive outreach? How do we create rapid response system being put into the place where we can provide citizens with the right guidance? Now what further complicates our task is the issue of siloed data and inconsistent responses. Now what we in this, you know, today, the automation is the key aspect and how automation capabilities could actually free up a lot of agents' times, to do what machines can do or to where I AI can add value, where the agents can focus on the high value and complex queries from the customers. While we're looking at all that, the key aspect is to the threats. They we still have to sort of watch out for the security threats, which sort of looms large. We can personalize the services around protecting the privacy and data of our citizens, which is paramount, but also achieving the balance of personalization and privacy at the same time. So with this, we'll go into an overview of our, platform. Thanks, Mohit. So good afternoon, everyone. Just gonna walk you through, I guess, the kind of overview of the digital contact center platform, which will be brought to life by Dan later on this afternoon. Mo has done a fantastic job in articulating a lot of the challenges that we're seeing across government. And one of those is that there's such a broad technology landscape within a lot of our kind of government organizations to date that this leads to a massively disjointed approach when we're thinking about systems and data. When we think about across the contact center, things like the CRM capability, AI that's now everyone's trying to, trying to leverage, telephony capability and unified communications, what this then has to offer is that, often civil servants that work in the contact centers are challenged by the fact that they're having to try and find a lot of this information that sits in all of these different places. As a result of that they spend a huge amount of their time trying to find this information to actually serve customers, and what we're seeing more and more is actually this is causing a huge amount of dissatisfaction and frustration, and as a result leading to massively high churn rates in government contact centers. Now from a citizen experience perspective, we're also seeing that this, internal agent challenge is being reciprocated, and challenged into the customer experience because we're seeing larger average handling times, trying to find information, customers being put on hold, and as a result, there's no kind of three sixty degree view of a customer. So with the Microsoft Digital Contact Center platform, we have a seamlessly integrated capability in the platform for a unified agent experience that enables them to leverage, the CRM capability, have AI at their fingertips to support and and better enable their productivity, have telephony and unified communications all in one platform so that actually that agent experience is more seamless, which then enables a much more seamless customer experience, and, enabling the government to better serve their citizen across all of the services that they deliver to citizens. Over to you. So the Microsoft did as James said, the Microsoft Digital Contact Center approach is to look at it holistically, to provide the platform to for consistent experience for both the customer, citizen, and the agents or advisers. The idea is to have a true omnichannel experience. No matter where the citizen started, they receive the same experience. But to get to the fully mature and innovative level that is customer centric, you should be ready to harness AI. And what does that mean? You want to add some conversational IVR. You'll want to automate manual tasks using robotic process automation, and to have some AI suggestions about the best next steps, for example, to know what the customer is interested in when they call, but also what they might be interested in the future, It's to have some predictive targeting, which helps you to build better engagement to meet the government goals, what was successful before, to make sure that it continues to be successful. And then, of course, we need to take into consideration things like biometric authentication and fraud prevention. So I'll sort of pick up a government use case of using generative AI in contact center. Now, you know, even if you're running a business or if you're a citizen, a common thing is what sort of funding is available to me? So let's assume, I am looking for what I want to change my boiler. There's a lot of government schemes around heat pumps. How do I find out what's the best way to apply for that funding? What sort of funding is available? Now, if you go online, you basically, as I mentioned before, get overloaded with information. Now think of a use case where I could go in and I can ask a chatbot. I go into a portal, I get prompted, and I can ask a chatbot saying, what sort of funding is available to me as a citizen for a heat pump? And I get the right response. I can then use that response to say, okay, how can I apply for that funding? I put my and I'm guided all the way through with an intelligent, intelligent bot. Now this bot is powered by generative AI behind the same with the right knowledge base. What this would do is this would actually cause, will create a digital deflection and remove those calls from the contact center to more a self-service use case. Now just in case, if I get stuck and I don't have the right context or the right documentation with me, this this bot can pass me over to a to a contact center agent as a voice call. So it could say, we will give you a callback. I don't have to wait in the queue. I receive a call. The agent has all the context of the information, what I'm looking for, who I am. They do a quick IDMB to identify I am who I am, and then they get a live transcription of all the information, as well as they can sense the tone of my voice, what am I looking for. Now this live sentiment analysis could be very key when we are working in the vulnerable sector or when we are working with businesses to identify if if the customers if our citizens are feeling angry, they're feeling anxious, and supervisors can jump in and help in that, in that in that time. Now also what we could do is we could help our agents with pre templated responses using generative AI and with the right knowledge. So we could educate them. And that what that does is it reduces the time to bring agents up to speed when delivering in a contact center. We have seen from our experience, we're using similar technologies, the time to increase the time to sort of ramp up an agent is reduced by best part of forty percent. That's an immediate cost saving to make an agent more productive. And lastly, for any contact center, manager and operations lead, monitoring and compliance is a key aspect. How do they ensure agent compliance and major performance? And generative AI and this can actually help us, monitor their performance as well. And lastly, what we are doing is using generative AI. We are increasing the automation to do that digital deflection using the co pilot capabilities of the platform, the AI capabilities that Sheila touched upon, to make the agents more productive, provide them with the right tools, the right knowledge to serve the citizens better, and help them find the knowledge better. And overall, what it's doing is it's driving that better citizen experience and higher NPS and customer and CSAT surveys. So let's see how TTEC Digital and Microsoft can help. So we kind of discussed about the channel, it is crucial to, you know, to place the play it sits in at the heart of every decision. And with Microsoft's dynamic customer service platform, coupled with tools like Copilot, it's engineered to meet them head on. And now what I would say, imagine a government experience that is not uniform across all channel, but also deeply intuitive and responsive. With the d three six five, we could drive an all customer journey orchestration, which is consistent across all channels, whether the customer reaches out through a phone, through an email, through a chatbot or social media, using the Copilot's advanced assistant and guiding our agents through complex queries. Now Copilot's AI driven insights can enable agents to deliver that integration, and hence, we deliver that integration across all the channels to make it seamless experience for citizens. And I think that's what we drive today. We we we're sort of striving for today. Now next, we look at how can we remove those, repetitive tasks for our agents. How we how we could if we look at any contact center, most of the common queries can be answered using either a self-service portal or a bot or a wrap up of a call, which takes best part of five to eight minutes what we have seen every time that could be reduced using Copilot capabilities. This does not only boost the productivity, but also boost the agent morale of removing this monotonous work out of their, out of their day to day activities. Now with the Dynamics scalability, these things and and Microsoft Copilot, you know, Gen AI capabilities, I believe that's a clear game changer in the contact center area. It it can also be adjusted to match up seasonal volumes. An example would be, you know, recently this is work this is an example sort of slightly out of context, but we had the ATC outage. Right? So that would have caused nightmare for any airline or any holiday booking company and even for government, even for the, you know, the citizens, advice function for, for the airlines. Now how you could mitigate that is by putting a chatbot upfront with the right knowledge base supporting it, and that could help deflect a lot of calls to that through that chatbot. But the citizen's able to find the right information within a click of a time. And I think these kinds of things can also be used during the self assessment time, you know, in January thirty first of January, most of us, if we have to file a self assessment, we have we tend to ring up the contact center. We could use that, and that could help drive those operational efficiencies. And backlog is always a persistent issue in contact center. If you look at resolving cases, etcetera, you know, we were talking to someone. They said in an off season, they still have a backlog of four thousand cases to handle. And these these generative AI can help them go through those mundane, removing those mundane queries, help focus on complex queries, and with the use of knowledge base, help drive to solve those queries again and again. And lastly, sort of what we touched upon was how do we transform our agents with bringing all the data together. So how we can make it more accurate, provide standardized responses so there's no two different responses when they're talking to different teams or different individuals. So we're kind of creating a central repository of information and hence reducing errors and building trust. And the platform also enables us to provide that personalized service to each citizen. So when there is the template responses are created by Copilot, the users' agents can go in and they can make it more personalized. They can add some contextual based on the conversation they've had. And then with the real time data and insight, they can make tailored advice to each interaction as well. And lastly, we never forget about security. With Microsoft security, across its data center, with the solution being SaaS hosted, we are at the forefront of commitment to make sure the data is secure and and designed for privacy. So to make sure every citizen we serve, their data is protected while we're providing them the right personalized experience. So just to give you an overview of who we are, so we have been working public sector for a long time and we've been delivering a personalized experience across, you know, customer experience, both from a citizen's perspective and from agents perspective. So we can help you build that deep understanding of your, of your citizens and consistently deliver personalised experience to tackle many of the biggest movements, in a citizen journey and from applying for a driving license to getting married, to getting a birth certificate or travelling the world and more. And just a brief overview of our capabilities. We were named as a launch partner for digital contact center back, last year. However, just to, what that enables us is we have a close relationship with Microsoft as we've got the Microsoft team here, and we also have a close relationship with the product group. So we we know what's coming down the line along with the Microsoft team, and we can bring that insights to our customers when we work with them. Thank you, Dan. And thanks for that wonderful demo. I think, that kind of shows the wide variety of the platform capabilities as well from using generative AI to suit reading images, you know, and making the contextual, providing context to the agents and empowering them with the right information at the right time. So I think all this if we put that into context of, how this basically helps in a contact center is it base it it makes a more efficient use case and better better customer conversations. And overall, what it help drives is a lot more smoother customer experience and agent experience. We're not just focusing here on the citizens experience, citizens experience, which is primarily focused, but also the agent experience as well. So making that end to end customer journey and agent journey as smooth as possible with the leveraging the right tools to empower the agents. We we kind of write in time probably a couple of minutes before, and we're happy, for a moment for questions. But if you're looking to sort of for next steps, we're happy to schedule a, discovery call with you to understand, your challenges currently in your contact center, in your customer journeys, and provide a detailed demo which is specific to your needs, specific to your use cases in your business environment. So Hilla and James are here as well as your Microsoft, account reps. So they will please feel happy to reach out to either myself, Hilla, or James, for next steps. We've got one question we've received via email for now, which is, have we seen any measurable improvements, in response times, accuracy, or even citizen satisfaction? I can give you a twofold answer with the DCCP with the recent implementations. We've actually seen a, the way I would put it, we've seen a we've seen a lot of digital deflection as we go through because with the introduction of chatbots as Dan was talking about, what that has led to is a lot of, monotonous queries and, regular inquiries have gone to been answered by the chatbots and been delivered. And we've seen that agents are spending more time on complex queries. So what we've seen is the agent handling time has gone up, but it's gone up on the complex queries, not on the mundane queries. So mundane and sort of monotonous queries have been digitally deflected using the chatbot, but we have seen an increase in the first call resolution. So with those complex queries, we've seen a first call resolution increase by, if I remember, probably was around between eighteen and, between eighteen and, eighteen to nineteen percent in the first two months of implementation. Sorry. There's another question from Pauline. Sense of this project scales, departments require a reason, a skill set, probably a timing, testing before AI Copilot red line. So, in terms of the implementation we're talking about, project scale. So the last, the project I was talking about, I think it was, Don't Keep Me Honest here here. I think it it started earlier towards the start of the year in January and we've gone live with their two of two I think not in January. Sorry. We are in November probably. I think it started around May, May, May time frame when DCCP platform was available. In May. We've gone live with their two contact centers, in a stage where first one was in September. So, within five months time, second one in October and the last one is going live this week. From project stages, it's pretty much ran as an iterative project. So we did a big discovery upfront to make sure we had the good backlog and then an iterative, deployment, with a base for all the contact centers and then something specific if there were different departments required. In terms of departments, Paul, there was, you need the you need your IT team. We need IT to support to give us an overview of the right infrastructure, and also your telephony team as well. So we've got a whole, telco team as well, tele telco architects who understand the architecture of all the, different aspects of a contact center, and they can bring that knowledge as well. Just one point. Dan, go ahead. Yeah. Thanks for the for the question, Paul. Thanks, Mohit. And and with regards to the Copilot element, we have there's a there's a there's a there are a few prerequisites. There's a we we provide, like, a get ready, kind of get ready for Copilot, assessment as it were because you have to sort of prepare for Copilot by configuring your search and ensuring that people have the right access, to the various, apps and, you know, parts of your, sort of repository, whether that be your SharePoint repository or your knowledge base, in order for them to to get the most out of the out of the Copilot experience. Because it's only as good in terms of its its generative capability, it gets better and better as it as it gets as it gets trained, as it learns, but it's only as good initially as the data that it it it has at its disposal. So that was a a process that that lasted for around four weeks because we were working across multiple departments and so that there were there were a couple of very specific work streams there. And we kind of rolled it out, iteratively. So at first, because you could just go and enable Copilot now. Right? You know? But it's it's important that you sort of get ready for that and and and sort of configure your searches and and prepare for that. So we rolled this out iteratively. So at the moment, you know, Copilot's chatting across just a subset of of their of their data, and the other part of that work stream is is a sort of consolidation piece, you know, democratizing some of those knowledge base articles into, something a little bit more, kind of a little bit more sensical. So that's the next the next kind of part of the process. But it's a good question. So, yeah, at the moment, that that the the initial assessment and rolling out of that first phase was around four weeks. We have another question. Does it support many contact centers and one d three six five, many into one? So I think, Shoaib, your question is can, does it support many contact centers on a single d three six five environment? I'll, and I I one d three six five instance supporting many contact centers. I'll go to Dan for this, but I my my my my understanding is one, based on our, implementation I was talking about, that we're supporting three different contact center locations on a single instance with them going live in a staged, environment. Yeah. That's that's that's correct. So so we hope that answered your question. K. Any more questions from the group? Okay. I'll take that as a no. If you do come up with any questions, There is a handout from Paul Allen. Oh, yep. Hi, Paul. Hi. Instead of typing that, can can I just come online? Just very simply, how was it received within the contact center itself? So probably DVLA, probably a very large contact center. How how did you get them to buy into it, the cultural sort of changes that you experienced thereafter? So, I'll I'll answer that, Paul. I'll take that, and then please add where required. So we have a change management team who work very closely as part of our delivery team. So we engage the, engage the business from the outset. So we started very early on engaging the business, as part of the initial discovery and then also as part of the show and tell program show and tell, as we went through the delivery program. So the business was aware, from a from a I'll run two aspects here. From a technology perspective, there were regular communications communications to say here's a show and tell, this is what we're delivering. And our show and tells, don't get me wrong, they were quite, quite, quite big. We used to have an audience of around twenty, so different individuals from contact centers, the operation to contact, the operations managers of the contact centers, and their supervisors, etcetera, so that they can ask questions, they can get a look and feel of these things. Another aspect which we drove, and that was so that was to basically engage the team on ground. The other aspect was a top down approach where we had the top execs sending across the communication to the team saying new technology is coming and highlighting the benefits over the existing platforms as well. So how it would help deliver benefits in terms of, you know, automation, reducing query time. They had about, I think, four different applications and we were making we were making that to one. So kind of building that together as well. So there there was a lot, so we ran a sort of a, you could say, proper change management across it to get the business buy in and to make the project a success. That's that. And Brilliant. That's great. Yep. Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, everyone. I think that concludes today's webinar. We hope you found it very insightful. Again, Mohit, Hilla, and James and Dan are available if you'd like to email them directly. If you'd like to get more information, we'll be happy to provide it. TTEC Digital is also launching a state of AI and contact centers report. So if you'd like to get a copy of that, please contact myself. I'm more than happy to send that on to you. And, as we said at the beginning of the webinar, we will be sending this recording as well as the slide deck onto you, in a short while. And thank you very much for participating and hope you found it insightful. And thank you very much to our speakers. It was very good. Appreciate it. And have a good day, everybody. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure with the selection. Everyone. Bye now.