The Contact Center of Excellence or CoE supports contact center transformation to improve the customer experience and create operational efficiencies at customer agencies. Through providing implementation support and recommendations on best practices, emerging technologies, and shared services, we strive to revitalize the role of contact centers in ensuring timely access to accurate information while maximizing the impact of taxpayer dollars.

Throughout this training, we will refer to the following key concepts:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) – A group of technologies that when combined can automate time intensive and often expensive tasks to do by hand. These technologies fall into two groups: technologies that improve perception (the ability to recognize, such as natural language processing) or improve cognition (the ability to interpret and solve problems, such as machine learning).

• Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) – A tool to capture, consolidate, and analyze data on customer interactions. Its goal is to help organizations recognize and communicate with customers.

• Emerging Technology – Cloud-based emerging technologies driven by private-sector investments are revolutionizing the contact center space.

• Knowledge Management – A discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an organization’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously uncaptured expertise and experience in individual staff members.

• Omni-Channel – Integration enables a consistent brand experience regardless of the technology or method of communication customers choose to use. It also enables seamless transition among various contact channels (e.g., data from an email must be usable by an agent that later has a phone call with the customer).

• Quality Monitoring – Listening to an agent’s telephone calls to assess the quality of work associated with the call measures customer service skills, accuracy of information provided, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and data entry.

• Training – Thoroughly training customer service representatives from the beginning saves time, increases first call resolution, prevents mistakes, and reduces the number of repeat callers.

• Workforce Management – The art and science of having the right number of agents, at the right times, to answer an accurately forecasted volume of incoming calls at the service-level standard set by the contact center.