Challenges

Information overload creates challenges that impede government’s ability to serve the public and work with other agencies and departments.

  • Increasing Efficiency

  • Government employees communicate and collaborate predominantly through email, typically using MS Outlook® or mobile devices. As the volume sent and received has grown to an overwhelming level, important email is overlooked, making it difficult for the workforce to stay focused on top priorities.

    Information overload presents a variety of challenges to performance:
    • Valuable workforce time is wasted on unimportant issues
    • Important email is constantly missed
    • Project cost overruns are caused by communication delays
    • Managers lack the means to proactively identify, analyze and remove communication bottlenecks
    • Email reporting technologies are limited by a reliance on manual-input data and are often insufficient and inaccurate

    Government agencies need a solution that helps employees identify and act on important email, provide managers with reliable analytics and reports and implement email performance best practices while requiring minimal training.

  • Fostering Collaboration

  • Cross-government collaboration and innovation are essential to empowering the workforce to provide efficient public service. To facilitate the desired interaction and idea sharing, government agencies need to identify and tap into enterprise social networks currently obscured within their email system. This presents a variety of challenges:

    • 80% or more of an agency’s critical information flows via email, but it’s unstructured and difficult to extract, analyze, and present
    • Valuable subject matter expertise and working relationships are buried in email and lost
    • Current technologies do not learn behavior intuitively — they require manual input or static information sources
    • Compliance with agencies’ security and privacy policies is mandatory

    Government agencies need a solution to find and connect diverse expertise within, across and between agencies. Management needs new tools to help identify, measure and monitor the speed and quality of relationships, communications and knowledge transfer.

  • Enhancing Service

  • Until recently, customer service was not a top priority for government agencies. But as taxpayer expectations have risen, many government agencies have implemented formal customer service departments. The success of these operations depends largely on fast, efficient and effective communication with the public via email. This, in turn, requires that agencies overcome several key challenges to success:

    • Need for reliable tools to measure quality, benchmark performance and generate reports
    • Current technologies do not automatically measure quality or SLAs of email from within MS Outlook®
    • Information on key customer service analytics, relationships and process delays are buried in email and lost
    • Current customer service software narrowly relies on manual user input and provides insufficient reporting and analysis

    Government agencies need a solution that automatically gathers data from Inboxes (MS Outlook®, mobile devices) and generates reports on email volume trends, response time, actions taken and other key customer service metrics.