“When the call centers at the Department of Veterans Affairs experienced a surge at the beginning of the pandemic, the agency didn’t try to hire and train more people while the wait times for answers grew.”
“Instead, VA took a page from the private sector and implemented a chatbot in a matter of weeks.”
“Dr. Kaeli Yuen, a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer at VA, said starting in March the contact centers started to experience the surge in calls and that created frustration among veterans for how long they had to wait to ask a question.”
“At the same time, VA, like most companies or agencies, started to worry about having employees in the office and possibly contracting the coronavirus.”
“’This was the problem we were trying to solve in standing up the VA coronavirus chatbot. The purpose of the chatbot is to more quickly serve veterans with information about how the coronavirus is impacting their VA benefits and services,’ Yuen said on Ask the CIO. ‘It launched toward the end of April…’”
“Chris Murphy, the CEO for North America at ThoughtWorks, said a chatbot is a software code or a script that interacts with users in a ‘human-like’ way to help solve problems.”
“He said ThoughtWorks and VA chose one of the many existing chatbots that currently exist and are in use across multiple industries.”
“’The real question for us was which one would best serve the objectives and the needs we had to serve the veterans, and in regards to the urgency of the timeframe,’ Murphy said. ‘We were able to quickly settle on a particular chatbot framework from Microsoft. It’s really solid, met our needs and Microsoft already had an established relationship with VA so that helped as well…’” Read the full article here.
Source: VA found a fast solution to its growing call center wait-time problem – By Jason Miller, September 9, 2020. Federal News Network.
