Tech Trends: Contact Center AI Improves Citizen Experience and Agent Workspace

With these use cases, Grubb has seen big advancements in AI for contact centers in recent months. The trend will continue throughout 2025, improving both customer experience and the government agent work environment, he says.

“Every citizen-facing agency has a contact center, whether they realize it or not, or whether they want to call it that or not. If they have people answering phones for their citizens, they have a contact center, and they can benefit from contact center AI,” Grubb says.

Governments Embrace Contact Center AI Use Cases

Writing in CIO magazine, Jerry Dotson, vice president of public sector at Avaya Government Solutions, says, “AI is revolutionizing contact centers in the public sector by enhancing efficiency and enabling more personalized interactions with citizens. By leveraging AI, agencies can analyze larger volumes of inquiries in real-time, ensuring quick and accurate responses that meet the ever-evolving expectations of the public sector.”

Dotson points to a case study on San Jose, Calif., which deployed virtual agents in its 311 call centers in 2021. The goal was to speed up response times for citizen calls and provide quick answers. “With AI, the center went from handling 165,000 service tickets annually to 215,000.”

WATCH BELOW: StateTech identifies the top state and local IT trends for 2025

Grubb says that chatbots as the most prominent use case for contact center AI to date. “Customers can integrate chatbots with large language models. Those models can incorporate natural speech recognition with a customer focus. They can incorporate a customer’s vocabulary, and they can become self-learning,” he says.

Local governments may have contact centers for electric and water utilities or for 911 emergency calls. “Like most industries, these disciplines have their own languages. They have their own acronyms. They have their own abbreviations. These chatbots can now learn that language quickly,” Grubb says.

Chatbots can easily tackle automated and routine tasks such as fielding FAQs, resetting passwords and other jobs that don’t truly require live agents. Many customers embrace automation, preferring not to talk to someone if they can get fast help fixing a problem quickly and move on.

Gartner rates contact center virtual assistant and contact center chatbots as use cases that provide good value while being feasible to implement for contact center AI. The company rates contact center sentiment analysis, a growth area for contact center AI, as quite feasible but perhaps carrying low value.

LEARN MORE: Utilize AI to set a new standard for citizens.

Agencies Benefit from Secure Channels and Sentiment Analysis

To achieve a seamless contact center environment, government agencies must support omnichannel communications to ease the experience of citizens interacting with state and local agencies.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re on their phone, if they’re on their iPad or if they’re on any other device. It doesn’t matter whether they’re home, whether they’re on the road, whether they’re on a commuter train or anything else. It’s all got to work seamlessly. The most important thing with omnichannel communications is that you don’t lose the customer,” Grubb says.

Through omnichannel communications, contact centers should retain information logged by chatbot, such as names and addresses, and transfer that data to live agents so that citizens do not have to repeat themselves, he adds.

Many contact center organizations have recently shifted their focus to security and fraud prevention. Some large agencies previously were not able to determine how many spam calls they received. But modern tools can measure contact center volume and spam.

EXPLORE: South Carolina looks to its call centers to enhance citizen services.

For example, a provider may assess 100,000 calls over a month and determine that 20,000 of those calls were spam. Grubb says that expert analysis can reveal how much time is saved by blocking spam calls and how many hours are wasted responding to them.

Other tools can give agencies insights into their contact center effectiveness. Modern contact centers can analyze sentiment, for example. 

“We can tell if your customers are happy or unhappy. We can set off alarms to get a supervisor on the call right now, because a citizen is really irate. Then, we can gather analytics and score the citizen experience. Perhaps you had 90% happy citizens on these calls; you had 10% that weren’t very happy.”

Contact center analytics also can monitor the productivity of live agents to measure their workloads and flag when they may need a break, Grubb says. “These analytics may tell management, you need to hire more agents, or you need more virtual agents to improve the experience in your contact center environment.”