Summary of contents
✅ The City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is another public company that has improved citizen service in its territory. 🤓 Read below, how we managed to create a personalized 24×7 service that managed all telephone activity and citizen requests every day of the year and around the clock! 🚀
The agreement reached between the Cartagena City Council and the telecommunications operator specialized in companies and public administrations GESDITEL has allowed this City Council to improve its Citizen Service, extend its hours and dedicate the human resources that until now were responsible for performing repetitive tasks, such as telephone service for appointment allocation, to functions that require a higher level of specialization and that provide added value to citizens.
GESDITEL’s virtual assistants are able to verify the user’s identity, checking the veracity of their identity document (DNI, CIF or NIE) and offer and book prior appointments for each of the agendas of this City Hall of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Nearly a quarter of a million citizens benefit from this innovative service that allows to book appointments at any time from Monday to Sunday and at the same time, avoid human contact during this process.
Why did Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council contact GESDITEL?
The City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife needed technological support to automate the assignment of appointments without personal contact. The Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council” Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Hall. The virtual assistants of GESDITEL already automate the assignment of Prior Appointment in other Public Administrations, so they invite us to a public tender of which we were the winners.
How did your Citizen Service and City Councils work in Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council?
Until the provision of this service, the City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife employed several people for the telephone attention of the citizen and the manual assignment of previous appointment in their computer systems.
What needs did we detect?
- Need to automate the telephone appointment service
- Manage appointments reliably and without human contact.
- Expanding telephone service opening hours.
- Improve wait times for appointment booking.
- Avoid human contact and crowds.
- To have full control over the system.
What solutions do we implement?
After analyzing the volume of calls received, and calculating the time required for a virtual assistant to book an appointment (in this case, the average is 1.5 minutes), we opted for the following solution:
- Call Queue Management Software:
As soon as the phone call enters the system we run it through our call queue management software. This software takes care of minimizing the response times of the 8 virtual assistants and keeping the users on hold when more than 8 calls concur.
- Virtual assistants for telephone appointment management.
Each attendant is capable of handling a simultaneous call and ending the call with a booked appointment. As soon as the call is taken the attendant is free to take the next call in less than one second.
- Integration with 49 different agendas.
We integrate our assistants with 49 different agendas hanging from 7 geographic locations. To maximize the profitability of the assistants, all of them are able to manage appointments in the agendas
- Text to Speech function
Thanks to this function we can translate to speech the text that the Town Hall appointment booking system presents on screen. It is quite useful to avoid having to modify the assistants when changing data of some of the agendas (address, name, etc..). The virtual assistant will read that is written on the agenda and no modification will be required.
- Tone detection function by DTMF (dialing numbers on the telephone keypad)
To facilitate the user experience in this system, DTMF tone detection is agreed upon. That is, the user will give commands with the keypad of his phone instead of by voice. This system is programmed in this way because of the difficulty in transcribing people’s surnames. The wizard offers options and the user decides with their keyboard.
- Verification of different types of identity documents: DNI, CIF, NIF.
Wizards offer several options for identification: DNI, CIF or NIF. Verification of different types of identity documents: DNI, CIF, NIF. Once the identity document has been entered, without handwriting, the assistant verifies the veracity of the same and passes to the next phase for the appointment reservation.
- Integration with the Appointment system used by the City Council (company “Encólate”).
GESDITEL assistants consult the previous appointments available in the software that the City Council normally uses. It consults the available appointments and offers several options to the user. Our assistant adapts to the needs of the City Council, not the other way around. There is no need to change software.
- Closing of appointments and communication to the user of place, date and time.
Once the appointment has been made, our assistants ask the user for a contact telephone number. At this point we have the option to send an SMS to the user with the details of the appointment.
- Statistical information on the performance of virtual assistants and call concurrency.
To guarantee at all times the correct functioning of the system, we provide the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council with an online platform where they can consult in real time the statistics of the performance of the virtual assistants and the call concurrency of their departments, offering detailed information on total volume of calls received, calls per hour, calls per day of the week, calls handled by each of the assistants, etc…..
What is the result?
BEFORE
- Phones manned by people
- High staffing costs.
- High waiting times.
- Appointment scheduling reduced to office hours.
- Lack of statistical control of the process.
NOW
- Automated pre-appointments
- Structural cost savings.
- Expansion of hours to 7×24.
- Nearly zero waiting times.
- Real-time statistical information.