How a Rapid-Turnaround Contract Opened the Door to the Future for DCSS

The California Department of Child Support Services had a problem: Its contact center technology was at end of life. It was unreliable. And it couldn’t serve as the foundation for new tech.

So, in the first half of 2024, Five9 and AT&T — longtime partners who both serve California state government through the CALNET program — worked with DCSS to implement Five9’s cloud-based contact center-as-a-service platform, focusing heavily on two things: User engagement and rapid turnaround.

As DCSS handles the high-stakes processes involved with child support, it was important for the department to avoid downtime for its contact center.

“One goal of the new platform implementation was to be as seamless as possible to the public and ensure quality services continued uninterrupted,” wrote Catherine Lanzaro, DCSS’ CIO and Technology Services Division deputy director, in an email to Industry Insider — California. “DCSS met this goal by migrating to the new platform overnight and we were available for callers the next day during normal operating hours.”

The user engagement process, Lanzaro said, was there from the beginning. The project began with DCSS working with subject matter experts to “reflect on the past and create a vision and goals for the future.” That meant surveying the market, with the help of the California Department of Technology, Gartner and dozens of vendor demonstrations.

It also meant a big emphasis on learning.

“In general, contact centers can have high staff turnover which is often attributed to the steep learning curve of the platform or requirements for the contact center agent to be very knowledgeable of the business program,” Lanzaro wrote. “DCSS is no different than any other department facing this challenge and took this under consideration when embarking on this project.”

As part of the project, DCSS defined user adoption and customer satisfaction as keys to success and conducted interactive discovery sessions to review whether requirements had been met — all in the name of getting users excited about the new platform.

Five9 also used its training platform, Five9 University, to get DCSS staff up to speed faster.

The call center migration offers DCSS a host of other benefits. Five9’s platform comes out of the box with language translation services, according to a spokesperson for the company. Multilanguage support is crucial in a state as large and diverse as California, where about 45 percent of people 5 years or older speak a language other than English at home.

A modern, cloud-based solution is also an upgrade in itself, because it removed barriers to technological progress and expansion.

“With a cloud-based platform, the system has the scalability to handle future capacity needs,” Lanzaro wrote. “It can handle more agents, more calls and provide significantly more services than were available before.”

There is an opportunity for future growth in areas such as enhanced security capabilities, call recording and quality management, and agent assist features that provide standard transcription and summarization of calls.

The project comes as the latest in a modernization push for DCSS. In recent years, Lanzaro has led the department’s major cloud migration and the signing of a digital transformation contract — along with other projects.

Eyragon Eidam contributed to this report.