Skip to main content

4 Scenarios for Public Sector Customer Service

Government agencies at federal, state and local levels are trying to improve their performance and increase customer satisfaction even as resources are shrinking, and skilled workers are retiring from government service and taking their experience and knowledge with them.

Innovative government agencies are taking advantage of the latest technology to achieve better responsiveness and help people find answers more quickly 24 hours a day.  The following are four scenarios for government customer service, along with current tools and techniques.

1. Citizen Services

Many government agencies deliver services to citizens, such as social services, building inspections, public safety and many more.  These agencies make themselves available through many channels, such as office hours and call centers.

A growing technique is to enhance the agency website to include a detailed knowledge base which helps customers find answers on their own without making or phone call or waiting until office hours.  The knowledge base can take the form of frequently ask questions (FAQ) or troubleshooting wizards.

The Social Security Administration, for instance, has the following FAQ site:


The site has menu options of top help topics, a search option, and a listing of the most popular knowledge base articles. Each article captures feedback from users so that they can be continuously improved.


Investing time to build a knowledge base is an important tactic in preparing for turnover in government personnel. Writing down the knowledge and making it more widely available can improve productivity.


2. Live Chat and Social Integration

Another scenario for government customer service is live chat.  Consumers are increasingly relying on live chat to interact with companies.  It offers advantages over phone calls because it captures a written record of the transaction, and allows easy sharing of links, videos, photos and screens to zero in on an answer.  Live chat is asynchronous so customer service reps can handle more than one chat at a time, unlike a phone call.


The General Services Administration operates the USA.gov website which offers live chat. It is a portal to access all government agencies.

Social integration offers a new channel into customer service so that customers can initiate a conversation on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media which will be answered by the government agency.


Parature, from Microsoft offers multiple channels including social as well as knowledge base and a full featured service desk for managing cases.

3. Video Training

Video training allows agencies to take their knowledge base to the next level, and provide deeper interactive content for complex subjects.

The National Institutes of Health, for instance, offers a wide range of online tools for researchers.


The Small Business Administration has a learning center with dozens of instructional videos to help business get started on the right foot.



4. Agency Help Desk

In addition to customer service to the public, government agencies have high demands for internal support within their agency.  Large federal agencies must support tens of thousands of employees with sophisticated services such as on-boarding, computer support, security procedures, leave tracking, and benefits.

Most agencies have multiple help desks, often using different software systems to track trouble tickets.  It can be difficult for employees to know the best place to start for their problem or question.
Creating a single portal to get help within an agency produces the same benefits that it would for customers of that agency or a company.

New software products provide integration between help desks, allowing issues to be routed to the right people to solve problems quickly. Cazoomi, for instance, offers bi-directional integration between dozens of products including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Parature, Jira, MailChimp, Salesforce, Netsuite and more.

Agency help desks benefit from the same tools and communication channels as outward-facing help desks, such as knowledge base, live chat, and videos. Increased transparency in government has revealed agencies that need to improve their customer service for internal and external customers, and we can expect progress in adopting tools to achieve better results.








Popular posts from this blog

Key Concepts for Microsoft Dynamics 365: Tenant, Instance, App and Solution

Updated 8/15/2022 To understand Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) and Power Apps, you need to learn some new terms and concepts that may be a bit different from what you know from databases and solutions that are hosted on premises.  These concepts also apply to Power Apps.  The main difference is that with Power Apps you are not starting with a Microsoft app but more of a blank canvas for your custom apps.  This post introduces some key terms and how these concepts are important for planning your implementation. While Dynamics 365 is still available on premises, it is most commonly deployed on the Microsoft cloud.  This blog post discusses only cloud implementations. Microsoft has multiple clouds such as commercial and government community clouds in several countries. We start with a Microsoft tenant .  A tenant is the account you create in the Microsoft Online Services environment (such as Office 365) when you sign up for a subscription. A tenant contains uni

Understanding Dynamics 365 and Office 365 Admin Roles

Managing Dynamics 365 instances If you run Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) in the Microsoft cloud, you need to understand how your Dynamics instances relate to Office 365 and choose which of your administrators receives which roles and permissions to manage Dynamics 365. In on premises deployments, your network administrator would create and delete user accounts.  The Dynamics 365 admin would then assign permissions to users in Dynamics 365. This post explains three administrator roles: Office 365 Global Administrator Dynamics 365 System Administrator Dynamics 365 Service Administrator You may think that the Dynamics 365 system administrator would have power to do all the actions needed to manage Dynamics 365, but this is not the case. What's different in Microsoft cloud deployments is that licenses and user accounts are managed in Office 365 by an Office 365 Global Administrator.  This role is analogous to a network administrator for an on premises

My Favorite Microsoft Power Apps Bloggers and their Blogs

  by James Townsend Updated 7/5/2022 Microsoft Power Apps is one of my favorite subjects, and I enjoy reading blog posts from members of this thriving technical community.  Here are some of my favorite bloggers and their blogs: The Official Microsoft Power Apps Blog   I have to start with the official Microsoft Power Apps blog.  It has many contributors, largely Microsoft program manager, including frequent posters Denise Moran ,  Greg Lindhorst , Kartik Kanakasabesan , and  Adrian Orth .  This is the place to go for product announcements, updates and technical how-to for a broad range of Power Apps topics.  April Dunnam April Dunnam was formerly focused on SharePoint and now devoting herself to Power Platform.  April offers highly understandable explanations of Power Platform, Dataverse and other top Power Apps topics. She joined Microsoft in late 2019 and has a thriving YouTube channel .  Carl De Souza Power Apps Blog and eBook This is one of the most extensive and best organized blo