Sullivan County: Using virtual agents to serve more citizens faster, at any hour of the day

Challenge: Supporting a growing population with a limited county staff

The county offices for Sullivan County, New York, support more than 40 departments, ranging from the County Clerk's Office to Emergency Services and Parks and Recreation. Their busiest offices were handling hundreds of phone calls and emails every day about the same basic questions: "What are your hours?," "Where can I pay my taxes?," and "How do I renew my driver's license?" Serving more than 78,000 citizens with limited staff and budget made it difficult to keep pace with call volume demands and maintain responsiveness to citizens.

The county offices wanted to provide citizens with a higher level of service and reduce the growing workload on their staff, but didn't have the resources to expand their team or stand up costly call centers. Instead, the county focused on how they could answer simple questions quickly and reduce the amount of calls coming into the county so their staff could devote their time to help citizens with more complex questions that required their attention.

Solution: A virtual agent provides real-time online support

Sullivan County's offices turned to Google Cloud's tool Dialogflow to establish the Sullivan County Virtual Agent that immediately helps web users find the information they seek. SpringML teamed with Sullivan County and Google Cloud to bring the deep AI, data, and technology expertise required to develop and launch the solution in just under three months.

The Sullivan County Virtual Agent is an artificial intelligence-driven program designed to immediately answer common questions on the County website. When a person clicks on the chatbot logo in the lower right of their screen, the Virtual Agent provides a list of topics and a spot to type in questions.

"We were particularly impressed with how they, as large tech companies, strove to understand our needs, concerns and limitations as a small municipality with a limited budget and staff, yet a large geographical region to cover," says Dan Hust, Sullivan County Director of Communications.

Results: Fast, easy adoption for employees and residents alike

The Sullivan County Virtual Agent provided citizens with a multimodal customer experience accessible in real time and gave its existing employees back time in their days to focus on more complex tasks. The County Clerk's Office, for example, which processes thousands of documents for various passports, permits, and courts, can automatically answer questions about operating hours or document filing processes so citizens get answers in moments rather than waiting in line for the next available representative. Meanwhile, government agents can focus their time on helping citizens with more complicated situations.

"Our employees are happy that they can get more done, and that they're able to provide a better customer service experience for our residents and visitors," says Josh Potosek, County Manager.

The Sullivan County chatbot is also helping the county DMV to continue serving customers outside of normal operating hours, such as nights and weekends, so they can have 24/7 access to the information they need. "If it's midnight on Saturday, and someone is figuring out when they can go to the DMV on Monday, now they don't have to wait until we're open on Monday morning to find an answer," says Potosek.

And as people access resources via the chatbot, call volumes decline. "The DMV experienced a more than 56% reduction in call volume in the last four months compared to the same time last year. It blew past our expectations," adds Hust.

Looking forward to a digital-focused Sullivan County

The successful use of Dialogflow is driving further change across Sullivan County. The county aims to digitize more processes through Google Cloud, such as implementing form submission tools to make form management for various offices a self-service function.

One of the county's goals is to introduce Dialogflow-powered virtual assistants to every department in the county so they can offer improved support to every resident and visitor in Sullivan County.