Today, exceptional, personalised, and reliable customer service isn’t just something the average commercial consumer expects. Citizens accessing public sector services also want to be able to look forward to an experience tailored to their needs. Notably, today’s consumers expect every interaction to be fast and meaningful, regardless of calling a bank or government group.
Public sector organisations can earn the crucial trust they need to keep their communities running smoothly with access to the right CX technology. The Citizen’s Advice Bureau in the UK discovered this when they decided to work with Freshworks.
Here’s what happened when Citizen’s Advice reached out to Freshworks to find a more effective way to empower their teams and drive phenomenal customer service.
Upgrading Customer Service Strategies
Citizens Advice in the UK is a non-profit public sector organisation offering advice on everything from finance to bill management and healthcare to those who need it. The entity comprises 285 independent, local non-profits empowered by the government and offers support to more than 2.5 million people per year.
Aside from being an essential advisor to the masses, Citizens Advice is also the statutory regulator for the post and energy sectors. A wide variety of thousands of paid staff and volunteers work together to keep this organisation running smoothly.
Before turning to Freshworks for support, Citizens Advice was looking for a way to manage interactions with millions of people across multiple channels without unreasonable costs. The team wanted to improve how the support and service teams were managed through the better use of data. The product manager for the group, Simon Sheridan, was given responsibility for implementing a new system for handling requests and management throughout the organisation.
With a cloud-first mantra, Sheridan chose Freshworks as the flexible and scalable solution for its CX upgrade. Notably, the technology could integrate directly with the tools the group already used (like Google Apps), and it was priced at a rate suitable for a non-profit, public sector group.
Scaling and Standardising Support
As both a public sector and non-profit institution, Citizens Advice has a wide mix of internal and external customers to support and a host of staff members in unique locations to consider. The organisation already had a complex IT infrastructure when turning to Freshworks, which included several legacy processes and tools.
Switching to Freshworks, the team wanted to embrace a fresh start with support and service. The brand had many issues coming in all the time, all of which needed to be managed properly from start to finish. Freshworks helped control all activity and maintain complete visibility within the digital ecosystem.
Freshdesk not only helped to enhance internal support strategies but external support too, with a helpdesk and ticket management system built-in. This environment supports all the requests made for service from workers and volunteers distributed throughout the charitable groups making up Citizens Advice. Now, more than 11,000 requesters are active on Freshworks.
According to Simon, the team liked the approach Freshworks took with its products, implementing exceptional ease of use with an intuitive app design that didn’t have a massive learning curve. The Citizens Advice team found it easier to pick up the technology quickly without causing confusion between internal and external support teams.
Simon’s team implemented the solutions they chose for Freshworks in a phased structure, Starting with Freshdesk for customer support, followed by Freshservice for ITSM.