IRS is the First Federal Agency to Employ Groundbreaking Model for Desktop Recording
An innovative face-to-face contact recording solution captures each customer/employee interaction—and heralds an enormous new market for this technology.
More than seven million walk-in customers visited Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Field Assistance (FA) sites in 2006 for help with their taxes. Until recently, however, these sites relied primarily on periodic monitoring by IRS managers to assess the quality of the customer’s experience.
Traditionally, IRS managers observed customer interactions by looking “over-the-shoulder” of each Individual Taxpayer Advisory Specialist (ITAS) as she or he worked. But with 1,600 ITASs to monitor at 401 sites, this performance assessment method could be inconsistent as well as intrusive. The IRS needed a verifiable, repeatable process for collecting, measuring, and reporting the quality of customer/employee interactions.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s solution was to guide the IRS in developing and implementing a first-of-its-kind, face-to-face desktop contact recording tool to capture the conversations of every walk-in customer and the employees’ computer screens during those conversations, thus providing reviewers with access to thousands of audio/screen recordings that document customer/employee interactions.
It’s the first time this has ever been accomplished at a federal agency, and the first time this type of technology has been implemented on such a massive scale in any business setting.
But it was a daunting task, says senior associate Jay Burns: “Booz Allen is a trusted advisor representing the interests of the business, managers, IT community, employees, and software vendors to develop and implement the best solution for the IRS.”
The best-practice contact recording model delivers accurate, statistically balanced, computer-driven data selection the IRS did not have before. “This data can be used to isolate employee performance issues, identify training needs, or appraise procedures—all crucial factors in delivering quality service,” says associate and project lead C.J. Trayser. It can also help standardize how taxpayers are serviced across multiple sites.
IRS quality of service is monitored by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). After an extensive audit, TIGTA’s report encouraged the continued use and deployment of this new technology, and indicated that the system was reliable enough and business procedures effective enough that TIGTA would suspend its independent measurements of quality in favor of the results drawn from the Field Assistance contact recording system.
Even taxpayers have embraced the concept: Those interviewed after receiving services at sites with contact recording said they supported the approach as a positive step in ensuring quality service. Of the original 11,000 taxpayer contacts that occurred during the two-month pilot, less than 1% requested that their conversations not be recorded.
“Our goal is to have a microphone at every station,” Trayser says. By mid-2008, over 1,000 desks/counters at Field Assistance sites—also called Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs)—were connected, with a target of 1,600 nationwide by the end of deployment in 2009. The IRS is committed to assessing and improving service levels to the customers it assists each year, and contact recording is an increasingly important element of that goal.
“This is groundbreaking business,” says principal Tom Terragno, “and the potential to use this process to improve quality is not limited to the IRS—it can be applied to virtually any face-to-face service industry.”
The IRS is the only federal agency now using desktop counter recording, but any organization that serves customers at desks or counters, addresses employee performance, or reviews employee interactions with customers is a candidate for the technology.
Incorporating Proven Methods into New Approaches at the IRS
Telephone-based service centers have used contact recording for years. The public is familiar with the announcement, “your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes,” indicating calls to service centers are routinely monitored. Studies show that basic services such as courtesy and timeliness improve by having the technology in place, and that analysis of the contacts can improve service quality by targeting training to specific needs.
Without the capability to record conversations, measuring service quality accurately and reliably at an IRS “walk-in” office had its challenges. “TIGTA and Field Assistance had differing approaches for measuring quality of services provided to taxpayers,” Trayser says. TIGTA, which used a “secret shopper” method, consistently scored the Field Assistance’s quality of work and accuracy differently than the Field Assistance’s own assessment, which used a “stand behind” method. With two unique measurement styles, the two assessment models did not consistently agree on the level of service quality.
Tasked to find a method approved by both parties, the team’s first step was to determine how to deploy recording technology within Field Assistance. Booz Allen studied the business practices, available technologies, and political and social challenges of recording in a “face-to-face” federal government environment. At that time, desktop-based face-to-face recording solutions in a business environment did not exist, so there was little existing knowledge to draw from.
The IRS wanted to use an extension of an off-the-shelf design, so the team partnered with a vendor that had developed technology to capture recordings off the phone. Booz Allen asked the vendor to make the input source a microphone on a desk plugged into a PC and develop supporting software. Data had to be encrypted, remain on the PC for a period of time, and upload to a server on demand. Booz Allen was engaged to craft the initial software model, business architecture, and project plan for the application.
After extensive collaboration with internal and external business groups and staff, a successful pilot was run in 2005. Challenges of working within IRS security and data center guidelines and the refinement of the technology then pushed deployment into 2006.
“The desktop microphone is like a speakerphone, picking up sound from all around,” says Trayser. “In some offices, two ITASs might work side-by-side, while some offices are similar in structure to a single-wide trailer. In these cases, conversations are not completely private and voices of the ITAS and taxpayer may be heard by others. We don’t want to inadvertently record a conversation we did not intend to record, so we work closely with the IRS facilities managers to address these challenges.”
IRS can reconfigure some offices, but some facilities that are not suitable for contact recording may not get it until their leases expire and they move to a new space that meets requirements.
A Verifiable Process to Ensure Effective Reviews
In leading the desktop technology design, Booz Allen encountered challenges that included IRS network issues, business structures, physical suitability of sites, security, and the acceptance of the system by employees and taxpayers. Changing business practices within the IRS would prove to be as daunting as designing the technical solution.
“In addition to assisting in the contact recording software design, testing, implementation, and training, Booz Allen integrated the capability into the new business model, which improved both employee performance and the taxpayer experience,” says Burns. “We designed the quality and work review processes, and guided the integration of the queuing management processes into the contact recording capability.”
Booz Allen’s experience in organizational change was a key factor in being awarded the contract. “We had to know how the business functions to assist the IRS staff in accepting the change and IRS managers in building training around it,” Trayser says.”Our team’s experience in organizational strategies, strategic communications, systems analysis and architecture, and project management were also critical—this was more than just a technology project.”
Today, the IRS has a repeatable, verifiable review process, and Field Assistance can assure TIGTA and other oversight agencies of the effectiveness of its reviews by using contact recording. Measurements provide a baseline for quantifying improvements, and training can be targeted to actual cases rather than relying on managers’ reviews. Actions can be taken with confidence because recordings can be retained for 18 months for later reviews and, unlike human memory, are unaffected by time.
Booz Allen has been involved in every step of the process, from providing systems analysis and adjunct staffing services, to redesigning business processes and educating users. Today, Booz Allen continues to facilitate actions between the vendor and IRS, assisting in business decisions and directing the vendor when technology modifications are needed.
story posted September 15, 2008
