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Ed Next: Modernizing California's Employment Development Department
Introduction
- Tony Driver, an AWS Account Manager, introduces the session on Ed Next, California's multi-year modernization effort for the Employment Development Department (Ed).
- Ed is one of the largest state departments in California, with almost 10,000 employees and 225 office locations.
- Ed provides billions in unemployment, disability insurance, and Paid Family Leave benefits, and collects 40% of the state's general fund, making it the largest personal income tax collection entity in the U.S. after the IRS.
Modernizing Ed: A Customer-Centric Approach
- Nancy Foss, the Director of Ed, discusses the department's modernization project, Ed Next, and its mission to transform the customer experience.
- The pandemic exposed the limitations of Ed's legacy systems, which were overwhelmed by the surge in claims. This led to a reconsideration of the modernization effort to put the needs of customers first.
- Ed is implementing several initiatives to improve the customer experience:
- Migrating to Amazon Connect for its contact centers, enabling self-service options, call-back capabilities, and multilingual support.
- Establishing a customer experience team and a voice of the customer program to understand and address customer needs.
- Modernizing its tax application and migrating it to the AWS Cloud for better performance and disaster recovery.
Ed Next: A Phased Approach to Modernization
- Ron Hughes, the Deputy Director of the Ed Next project, outlines the various work streams and the phased approach to modernization.
- Key initiatives include:
- Implementing a shared customer portal (My Ed) on the Salesforce cloud.
- Migrating to AWS Connect for its contact centers, enabling features like virtual hold, scheduled call-back, and interactive voice response.
- Modernizing the document management system to handle the millions of paper documents received annually.
- Replacing the 45-year-old mainframe-based integrated claims management system with a new cloud-based solution.
- The modernization efforts are prioritized based on customer impact, with the most critical projects being addressed first.
Demonstrating the Contact Center Solution
- Chris Carter, an AWS Connect Specialist, provides a detailed demo of the self-service capabilities implemented for the disability insurance program.
- The demo showcases features like:
- Automated language detection and prompt playback in the customer's preferred language.
- Spam call prevention through a verification code.
- Natural language understanding using Amazon Lex for customer inquiries.
- Seamless integration with backend systems to retrieve claim status and other information.
- Call-back functionality to maintain the customer's place in the queue.
- Integration with Salesforce for claims management and agent workflows.
Conclusion
- The session emphasizes the importance of a customer-centric approach to modernization, the value of cloud-based solutions, and the phased implementation strategy adopted by Ed.
- The speakers express their pride in the Ed Next project and their commitment to continuous improvement and customer feedback.
- The audience is encouraged to reach out for further discussions and to provide feedback on the presentation.