Client

The Municipality of Panamá, with over 1,232,000 registered taxpayers, is the largest in the country in terms of number of inhabitants, business activities and circulation of vehicles

It is the capital of the country but also its economic and cultural nucleus, the municipality covers a large number of needs for its inhabitants, both natural and legal. In order to provide the infrastructure and services that a first-world city requires, the City depends on the collection of municipal taxes.

The Municipality covers a wide spectrum of activities, these range from the registration of new businesses to the regulation of municipal cemeteries, the administration of local markets and vehicle procedures and the sale of license plates.

Currently the Municipality carries out more than 300 procedures in total, and to achieve this it has the support of more than 1,400 public officials who must handle immense amounts of detailed, technical and legal information.

Key Challenges

• Update an outdated system without digital infrastructure.

• Personnel and operator limitations.

• Satisfy more than 90% of requests.

• Increase the number of incoming calls.

• Prioritize prompt and timely care.

• Minimize the need to physically go to a municipal office.

The municipality must keep users informed in a timely manner of their tax obligations in order to improve tax collection. To face this and other challenges, we focus on restructuring and modernizing the traditional Call Center, solving existing and long-term problems and creating a multi-functional and efficient tool.

Before the implementation of the Omni-Channel Contact Center, the Municipality of Panama maintained a Call Center that had 5 operators that received an average of 6,000 phone calls per month.

Internal reports show that 60% of the calls received did not connect with an operator. Through this channel the municipality offered information on more than 200 procedures but was limited when it came to offering solutions.

Due to the volume of calls, the low number of operators and an outdated infrastructure, the municipality did not have the capacity to attend to taxpayers quickly enough to avoid disconnection while waiting to be connected. The average duration of a call was 15 minutes long, depending on the needs of the taxpayer.

Under this system it was impossible to extract Data from conversations with users, there was no efficient way to measure customer satisfaction and therefore make changes and improvements to the system.

An important factor that exacerbated the problems that were already evident in the infrastructure and operation of the Call Center was the pandemic crisis of COVID-19. Agents did not have the capacity to comply with the recommendations of the Health Authority and to carry out their job functions through the work from home modality.

Another issue, as a result of the pandemic crisis facing the city, is the operation of the “Licence plate Center”. Local legislation requires users to pay an annual vehicle circulation tax and therefore update the license plate. As this is a procedure that all citizens with a vehicle registered in the Municipality of Panama must carry out annually, the issuance of plates is a massive challenge, between 1,500 and 4,500 plates were collected daily; In the historical context of COVID-19, where we must maintain social distance and avoid crowds, this was a problem.

The great challenge we face is to create a system that minimizes the need to physically attend municipal offices to carry out procedures.

For this we must update and re-imagine the functions of the call center, thus transforming an outdated structure that was not only inaccessible but confusing into a system that adapts to the needs of taxpayers and the City, creating digital tools that prioritize quick and timely attention.

Solutions:

To solve the communication problems faced by the Municipality of Panama, we created an omnichannel contact center using “Amazon Web Services” or AWS technologies, which allows for better attention to the citizen.

AWS services used include:

• AWS Connect

• AWS Simple Storage Service

• AWS Glacier

• AWS Kinesis

• AWS Lambda

• AWS Transcribe

• AWS DynamoDB

• AWS Elasticsearch

Thanks to the ease of use of the configuration tools that Amazon makes available to contact center users, it is now possible to make quick changes to flows that are in production. Non-technical staff can intuitively modify details within the processes in place, manage agents, view performance metrics in real time, and optimize the interactive voice response system or IVR service menus.

This ease of making changes allows strategies devised by operations personnel to improve service to be tested, for example, it is now possible to quickly check whether moving an option from one menu to another can lead to a decrease in the times of expected of citizens.

Thanks to its integration with AWS Simple Storage Service, the system saves the audio of telephone interactions automatically and thus allows to review when necessary, both what the agent said and what the citizen said, facilitating the management of quality control and providing traceability to interactions

In Panama, the legislation indicates that communications must be available up to 15 years after an interaction with the citizen has taken place, so AWS Glacier plays a fundamental role and allows us to save each recording in the long run for a competitive cost.

A differentiating factor of this solution lies in the ease of AWS Connect to work in tune with different information systems through integrations. Taking full advantage of the functionality of AWS Lambda, the Omnichannel Contact Center interacts with the City’s databases to make relevant information available to agents and citizens in real time. Likewise, we gave the power to the citizen to start processes and execute actions through this route, such as, in the contact center of the Licence Plate center, we offer the citizen the option of making an appointment , to search for your license plate, in an automated way and without the need to interact with an operator.

Once the audio is available in our S3 repositories, using AWS Transcribe we take care of transcribing each of the calls in order to generate data that can be used to apply artificial intelligence analysis techniques such as analysis of feeling. Never before has it been so easy to locate areas where agents are failing and citizens are not being satisfied. This allows us to identify parts of the process that need to be improved; Nor had it been so easy to make changes to attack these problems so quickly in the past. Thanks to the natural language tools at our disposal, we have obtained a clearer and more precise image of the reasons why the citizen calls, and how to satisfy his needs. The information resulting from the analyzes is saved in AWS DynamoDB to be quickly and efficiently searched with AWS ElasticSearch.

The paradigm shift described here took place during a dynamic and fluid era caused by COVID-19, and our solution allows Municipality operators to work from home, solving the problem caused by the mandatory quarantine and the closure of businesses and offices that took place around the country.

Working with sensitive information from citizens brings with it the additional consideration of meeting high security standards, and that is why the encryption of all the information handled in our solution and the PCI DSS certifications that AWS Connect has were essential. to ensure the viability of this project.

Results

• We double the number of incoming calls

• We reduce waiting time by 40%

• We increase the functionality of the contact center, offering more procedures and more solutions.

• We update the system infrastructure to a 100% digital, accessible by internet and adaptable to the modality of teleworking.

After the implementation of the new Contact Center, the results have been immediate, the system has been constantly adapted to the needs of taxpayers and the City’s.

The best metric that we can use to assess the success of the implementation is the number of calls received, from its application in April 2020 to the month of June 2020, we received 37,647 calls. We’ve increased the number of incoming calls by 208% in less than three months.

Despite the large number of calls, the system does not overload operators since the IVR manages to provide solutions for the most basic user queries. For the efficient operation of the Contact Center, "service queues" were created for the different types of procedures. Once in these queues, the system automatically provides all the relevant information about the process to the user, so that when talking to the operator the case proceeds more quickly. In this way the attention is much more fluid, the waiting times are shorter and the users are satisfied, the average duration per call is 6 minutes, which means a reduction of 40% in the time per call. But above all, the City is able to increase the tax collection in an efficient and organic way.

Another significant impact on performance indicators is seen in the number of appointments attended per hour by the license plate center. After the implementation of AWS products, an appointment control system has been created for the collection of plates on site. Under the best practices implemented, 150 appointments per hour are assigned, for a total of 1,500 appointments daily, in this way we maintain the order of arrival of taxpayers, the sanitary measure of social distancing is complied with and we make the distribution of the plates more efficient and fast.

In the context of COVID-19, we have adapted the system to provide important and relevant information for citizens, not only in the area of ​​collection, but in the area of ​​public health.

One of the lessons learned with the implementation of the solutions package for the City of Panama, has been that by increasing the number of communication channels with end customers, their level of participation increases. In addition, by having more feedback through the collection of Data from AWS services, we can make adjustments to internal processes and detect best practices. In this way we are sure that the decisions taken benefit customers and users.