CUSTOMER PROFILE
ABOUT
Available around the clock, 365 days of the year, 211 LA serves as a constant beacon of support for those in need in Los Angeles County, California. With close to half a million contacts each year, 211 LA connects citizens in need with essential community services including emergency shelters, housing counseling and search assistance, adult protection, and transitional housing.
LOCATION
San Gabriel, California
SIZE
57 full-time agents, 30 care coordinators, and approximately 10 supplemental or on-call agents to support emergency related surges in demand
GOALS
- Reinforce operational resilience with a cloud-based, easily transferable, available-from-anywhere solution
- Enable remote and flexible agent activation
- Gain robust scalability to accommodate emergency-related surges in demand
FEATURES
- An integrated digital foundation to power improved coordination with 211 organizations across the country.
- Empowered leadership with proactive planning and response.
- Journey orchestration and routing solutions to reduce redundant data collection tasks
01 THE BEFORE
A catalyst for cloud-based transformation
In 2011, 211 LA moved its contact center solution to the cloud. Over the next nine years, the agency leveraged the flexibility of its cloud operations to move some of its CRAs, approximately 30% by February 2020, into a hybrid work environment.
In January 2020, 211 LA received an influx of concerned citizens looking for answers and support about the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout that month, and into February 2020, the non-profit’s leadership had been tracking the uptick in COVID-related inquiries and knew it had to get in front of the crisis and moved all of its community resource advisors (CRAs) to work remotely, in advance of pandemic shutdowns, enabling 211 LA to prevent any disruption to services.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
The problem with patchwork
"In the tough battle for contact center talent, 211 LA found hybrid work options contributed to improved agent satisfaction and retention. However, the combination of third-party solutions contributed to a complicated solution architecture that was straining system management and cost of ownership. “It was like a patchwork quilt of services,” said 211 LA Chief Operating Officer Amy Latzer. “Our data wasn’t well connected, and that made it increasingly difficult to prove that we were maximizing our systems and our investments.”
”We wanted a full, 360-degree view of everything that takes place, and the first step was really to map the customer journey,” Doucet said. “We wanted to understand what customers go through—to enhance key touchpoints—and make our QA department more advanced than what you see at other call centers.”
In addition to making reporting difficult, 211 LA’s patchworked solutions made critical integration with other 211 organizations across the country difficult. While all independently operated, 211 organizations
nationwide share a similar mission and lean on each other to provide surge support following a regional crisis or natural disaster.
When hurricane season strikes in North Carolina, for example, 211 LA is on point to connect North Carolinians with community-based services from the safety of California. 211 LA leans on 211 organizations across the country to support its own county-specific peaks in demand. Coordination of this kind is seamless when both 211 organizations are on the NICE platform, but time-consuming and limited when they’re not. “Without that shared solution, calls are just blind transferred through a port-to number,” said 211 LA’s Senior Director of Operations Minh Dang. “So throughout that period of outsourced support we lose all the data, all the reporting, and all the controls over network access.”
ONE turned to NICE Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction to meet those goals.
03 THE SOLUTION
A digital partner to power human connection
Following the lead of other 211 organizations in California and across the United States, 211 LA selected NICE CXone to make its complex and critical job a little easier. “We weren’t just looking for a vendor—we needed a partner,” explained Latzer.
CXone established an integrated digital foundation for 211 LA to refer to and track underserved citizens across a network of mental and physical healthcare providers, emergency shelters, U.S. veteran services, food resources, and hate crime-response organizations. The solution’s text/SMS features relieve 211 LA’s voice traffic with the automated distribution of news and updates, delivered to citizens based on their opt-in criteria. And CXone’s journey orchestration and routing features help reduce redundant data input, giving CRAs more time to build relationships with their underserved clients.
To fulfill 211 LA’s mission to make essential services accessible to all—especially in times of crisis response—it needed a solution that could guarantee near-perfect uptime and the ability to flex with demand. Lazter elaborates: “With NICE, we can add thousands of agents from across the country in minutes, and we only pay for the capacity we need.”
And most importantly, it needed all that functionality to be deployed with imperceptible interruptions to its around-the-clock service. “We worked with NICE to configure everything we could in advance: We ported phone numbers, programmed and scripted the IVR, imaged workstations, and trained our CRAs,” said Dang. “We scheduled the cut-over for the middle of the night, so with the exception of the few CRAs on duty, neither our staff nor our citizens felt the interruption.”
04 THE RESULTS
Proactively meeting community needs
Today 211 LA is maximizing CXone to find proactive opportunities to serve its clients, even in the inherently reactive work of crisis response. “We now offer our unhoused community an opportunity to register with us if they are interested in shelters or housing vouchers,” said Latzer. “When we know inclement weather is in the forecast, we use CXone to proactively reach out via text with emergency housing resources and a link to chat if they have more questions, so they don’t need to get on the phone.” And if inclement weather strikes elsewhere in the country, 211 LA is better equipped to support. “If a hurricane is bearing down on a NICE-supported 211 organization, we can quickly create new user credentials and get to work without sacrificing their security or reporting,” said Latzer.
211 LA is working through the initial phases of utilizing CXone’s Feedback Management and Interaction Analytics to power improved workforce management functions, already experiencing the potential of those features when it comes to red-flagging nascent or high-impact issues. These NICE-identified trend lines have empowered a more proactive approach to serving the community.
“The county recently announced a rent relief program, and our voice lines blew up. We had close to 1,000 calls in the queue; it was painful to watch,” said Latzer. “With CXone we quickly determined what questions citizens were asking—most of which the county wasn’t quite ready to answer—and utilized the call back feature to redirect clients to our website where they could register to get more information. Once the county released more details, we used NICE to issue all that information via text.”
05 THE FUTURE
Leading an AI-enabled future for 211 organizations nationwide
211 LA is digitally preparing for the future, with plans to equip CRAs with bot-generated recommendations based on real-time transcripts and historical user interactions, taking one more step toward automating routine tasks to unleash human connection. “Each second a CRA spends manually searching is a second less spent building an authentic relationship with our clients,” said Latzer.
The organization is also exploring opportunities to employ AI to perform quality assurance functions with greater efficacy and fewer resources. “We’re thoughtful about what we introduce, but incredibly optimistic about AI’s potential to help us all connect more citizens with the services they need, said Latzer.
