How Child Support Programs Improve Customer Care
Child support programs across the country are always looking for ways to improve service to the families and other stakeholders they serve. Their mission is a challenging one: not just to ensure that child support cases are established and enforced in a timely manner, but to seamlessly receive, process and deliver billions of dollars in highly demanding timeframes. Whenever there are questions, they need to provide answers – and their customer care operations bear that load.
Two counties in Wisconsin recently found a way to address customer care challenges head-on – partnering with the Wisconsin State Disbursement Unit, operated by Conduent since 1999, to handle their customer care operations.
La Crosse County, a mid-sized county on Wisconsin’s western border, was facing the challenges of high call volumes and a legacy phone system that didn’t provide the necessary level of support. County officials set out to improve overall agency effectiveness while preserving the ability of callers to get program information quickly and efficiently. By working with the SDU, they’ve increased caller satisfaction through reduced wait times and efficient service delivery. Most importantly, these efficiencies have freed up time for La Crosse County staff to focus on their core mission of providing quality case management and enforcement activities.
Milwaukee County, Wisconsin’s largest, faced similar issues, such as phone technology that didn’t support the service levels expected or enable callers to get information quickly and efficiently. With effective Interactive Voice Response (IVR) scripting, the SDU operation was able to reduce call volume by 40 percent and cut caller wait times in half. Because county staff can now focus their efforts on high-value work, the effectiveness of case management and enforcement activities has increased significantly.
Want to know more? Read more detailed case studies for La Crosse County or Milwaukee County, or reach out to us to discuss your agency’s child support customer care operations.