Public Sector CX Case Study in Focus: Citizens Advice and Freshworks 

Freshworks helps citizens advice transform its CX

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Published: June 7, 2022

Rebekah Carter

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. 

Transforming Service with Freshworks

According to Citizens Advice, the Freshworks ecosystem allowed for a comprehensive overhaul of its operations. Freshdesk replaced a complex email correspondence and case management strategy, which didn’t consolidate interactions around specific requests. 

Simon noted that Freshdesk’s approach to user experience is powerful, making it easier to work around issues and deliver exactly what a customer asks for. Freshdesk also allowed the company to take some of the confusion around processes away from the team and automate some of the more repetitive tasks and heavy lifting. 

Before Freshdesk, Citizens Advice had a lot of manual interactions and processes in place, which made it challenging to close issues at speed. Implementing the Freshworks ecosystem has boosted agent efficiency by 40% and reduced time spent on issues by around a quarter.

Citizens Advice has now fully implemented both the Freshdesk and Freshservice environments, and it is continuing to expand the number of teams deployed into the ecosystem. Moving over into a cloud-based Freshworks environment gave Citizen’s Advice an excellent opportunity to track and identify customer journeys, regardless of where users were in the organisation. 

Alongside customer service process insights, Freshworks also gave Citizens Advice more data on how the organisation manages the issues that come regularly. Freshworks allows the Citizens Advice service management team to report on all tickets and service requests on a real-time basis. 

The reporting and measurement strategies the group has in place can now be as granular as possible, allowing the team to get a better picture of how they’re performing and where issues might develop over time. This allows the whole team to be more proactive in determining where to distribute crucial resources for great service. 

Looking Ahead to Better Service

Within a year of implementing Freshworks solutions like FreshService, the Citizens Advice team achieved a CSAT of 92.1%. The teams dealing with customer expectations at Citizens Advice also earned an overall recommendation rating of 99% from customers.

Simon and his team say they’ve been pleased with the results Freshworks has provided. Now, the group feels capable of easily benchmarking customer service and satisfaction scores every quarter, responding to data as it arrives, rather than waiting for anecdotal surveys and information to emerge after the fact. 

This visibility, combined with the other benefits of Freshworks, makes a significant difference to customers and helps agents provide the best quality of service. 

 

 

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