Transforming customer experience in local authorities

Customer experience is the epicentre for every single industry, including the public sector. When you think of customer service experience, you don’t consider those in local authorities, but they have to deal with more members of the public on a daily basis than most companies. As a local authority, your customer service communication workflow needs to be robust, and work well with your internal customer relationship manager, as many customer issues would be on-going and many of the touch-points would be follow-ups, not just new situations that can be resolved in a single interaction.

Members of the public can agree one consistent experience with local authorities: the queues can seem infinite. No matter which public service you contact, the waiting times are often long, and many people spend their breaks waiting in a queue, only to drop out when their break is over, leaving them to try again later. By enhancing the whole communication plan, the entire customer service experience can be instantly improved.

A massive communication advantage can come in the form of video communication, with a software like Click4Assistance, as it can improve the attendance of meetings and followups with members of the public. This can allow those who have time constraints at work to attend virtual meetings and not be forced to take time off of work, which especially benefits those who work in environments where time off means no pay. It also adds a cost benefit to those who have to travel to you for meetings, allowing them to save those pounds where needed. Small gestures like these can be seen as a positive sign of compassion and sensitivity on the behalf of the local authority, instilling trust and faith from the public and their customers.

While video meetings are virtual, you are seeing someone rather than only hearing a voice over the phone or just text via a live chat. Mentally, the tone of the conversation changes since someone is in front of you, even though it’s through a screen. Instantaneously, trust is built, as data shows that seeing someone, even if it is virtual, increases trust rates far higher than a phone call or text based communication.

Unlike many other forms of communication, video conferencing is the richest form of remote communication. Seeing someone and making eye contact builds a connection unlike solely hearing a voice, and people need that form of connection to create bonds and deepen relationships. As with every business, in both public and private sectors, the strength of relationships determines the trust, which determines whether the business is healthy or not.

Having a form of communication that can built trust, deepen relationships, cost less, save time, increase productivity and efficiency, and be nearly as rich as meeting someone in person, is the peak of communication technology. Video chat is also cost effective for the user in terms of travel reduction, but also cost effect for the local authority and increases productivity.

Video chat also supports remote working and remote communication, which is needed in times of a pandemic like the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Now more than ever, every organisation needs to change the way we communicate to support remote contact in much richer ways to ensure business goes on and life is improved, even in times of need.

Click4Assistance is the best communication solution for a local authority. It’s robust, comprehensive, GDPR compliant, and has all the bells and whistles in an easy to use, fully customisable dashboard. All of your communication from live chat, social media, AI chatbots and video are available in one space, so no more switching applications for every form of customer communication.

Click4Assistance also syncs seamlessly with your customer relationship manager, ensuring that your information on customers is consistent and thorough, so your customer service team can spend more time focusing on the customer, and less time switching through multiple applications to update customer notes.

Video chat is the next best thing from physically meeting people. Ideally, we would always like to host meetings in person, but in many cases this is not possible. The next best alternative would be video chat. If you’re interested in deploying Click4Assistance, the UK’s premier GDPR compliant live chat software solution, to increase your universities’ productivity for 2020, give us a call on 08451235871 or send an email to theteam@click4assistance.co.uk and one of our experts will be with you right away. Not ready to reach out yet? Discover how it works, try a demo, or better yet, try Click4Assistance completely free for 21 days.