Dreamforce 25 - how AI voice technology will give City of Kyle residents 24/7 phone support

The City of Kyle has had a sneak preview of Salesforce’s new voice feature for Agentforce. Its verdict: very impressive.

The Hays County, Texas city, which is already using Agentforce for online chat, was given previews of the technology ahead of Dreamforce, and is itching to add the voice tech to its 311 AI agent to offer a round-the-clock customer hotline.

Salesforce’s AI voice technology is no different to speaking to an actual person, according to Jesse Elizondo, Assistant City Manager:

This would fool you to think you're talking to a human being.”

Once the voice agent is available, the City will be able to move to a 24/7 phone-based customer service for its 311 non-emergency number. Most of the calls that come in on this line are during the city’s core operating hours, from 8am to 5pm. But outside of these hours, during the evenings and weekends, the city receives a handful of calls each day. Elizondo says:

We did an evaluation and it doesn't make fiscal sense to hire full-time employees for second and third shifts, because we're only getting five or six calls and you're going to pay an entire person just to sit there and answer five calls. But when you come in the next day, you have to answer the voicemails. We pitched to our implementation team - and they loved it - a use case where we have an agent that they can interact with for those off hours.

Out-of-hours

Residents trying to contact the city out-of-hours used to be told to either leave a message or call back after 8am. Currently, the city is able to take that one step further with the help of a 311 AI agent developed on Agentforce. Residents can carry out the interaction online as if they're talking to an agent during the off hours. 

Elizondo adds:

We can't do phone calls because we don't have an agent voice, but that's coming at some point soon. We are planning those off hours would be answered by the voice of an AI agent, submits it into the system, and at eight o'clock the next day, whoever's supposed to take care of that request down the line is sitting there ready to go.

Ahead of the AI voice launch, City of Kyle has been busy building a brainstem agent that contains all the city’s backend information. Elizondo notes:

We wanted to know all of the past and present of Kyle because the future iteration of it is, you connect a voice to it, and now it has a voice and has all that information. How you can utilize that from a customer service standpoint, from an internal standpoint, it's tremendous.

The City of Kyle originally deployed Salesforce’s Agentforce in response to the rapid growth the city is experiencing. Its population was less than 7,000 people 20 years ago; 15 years ago, it was under 10,000 people; as of today, it’s home to 70,000 people, and in the next couple years it expects to go above 100,000. Elizondo notes:

As far as people moving here, as far as infrastructure, businesses, last year, Kyle was the second-fastest growing city in the nation. It's a great opportunity for the city as far as tax base, and businesses and developments coming in. But it puts a tremendous amount of stress from an administrator standpoint on infrastructure, roads, sidewalks, water, wastewater. All of a sudden, you have all this population growth and it's not easy to necessarily keep up with that from an infrastructure standpoint.

Non-emergency calls

As a result of this fast growth, the council was getting a lot of feedback that the customer experience of contacting and interacting with City Hall was poor. In a bid to improve the customer experience, it decided to install a new system to run its 311 service, the number residents call for everything that's not an emergency, from potholes to fallen signs to library opening hours. Elizondo notes:

Normally if a city doesn't have a 311 line, they have to call the city itself, and there's 70, 80 different numbers across all these different divisions. It's very confusing for citizens to know exactly who they're supposed to talk to, what they're supposed to say. We wanted to build a foundational system where people could call in one number, get anything they needed in the city taken care of, and raise the customer experience for everybody.

The city ran an RFP and researched different CRM systems to track all the calls and service requests coming in. Elizondo says:

We needed a system that could keep up with the growth of the city, something that could last for a very long time, a legacy system and a system that was investing in future software, AI and innovative solutions within the CRM system and within the call center system.

The City signed up with Salesforce, after failing to find another system that checked all those boxes. It has been able to centralize all its different software platforms into the Salesforce system, and all its call takers are now in a centralized place. Elizondo adds:

We ended up saving more money by centralizing and being more efficient in our processes than it costs to buy and implement the entire system.

Ask me anything

As soon as the core Salesforce technology was in place, holding all the city’s data and foundational systems, City of Kyle wanted to immediately start using AI agents to elevate the customer experience. This lets call center staff answer very specific questions without needing to pass the caller on to a different department:

Now they can type into our AI agent internally with a question, get a specific answer, and give it to our residents. There's almost no question that those agents can't answer with expert knowledge because it's all built into the back end of that agent.

The City is already seeing benefits from its use of Agentforce. In the first three or four months since launching its 311 service running on Salesforce, the number of phone calls coming in has dropped by around 10%. 

Sentiment analysis

The City is also using an AI agent to listen to all the calls that come in, and analyze sentiment based on tone and words used to give an overview of whether it’s an angry, neutral or satisfied customer call. Of the thousands of calls every week, the number of satisfied callers have increased month over month, while the amount of negative calls has gone down. Elizondo notes:

We've attributed that to two things. One, the service they're getting is better, so they're happier about it. But two, the call takers themselves are having to spend less time, which is stressful, digging around and trying to find the answer. That's increasing their ability to provide better human customer support to the people because they're not, as a human being, getting stressed out all week long. They're freed up to be kinder, nicer, more supportive to all of our customers

The duration of each call has dropped almost in half, and first call resolution time is up to almost 90%.

The City of Kyle is now in the process of updating its website to release this agent to the public, with all that information and brainstem behind it. This means rather than calling in to ask their question, residents will be able to log on and get the answer themselves. This feature is due to roll out in November.

Check out diginomica's dedicated Dreamforce event hub here.