Selectron’s Relay platform is a powerful suite of self-service and customer communication tools that enables governments to communicate with and bring crucial services directly to citizens, while unifying system administration and reporting into a single user-friendly interface.

Selectron’s work with San Diego County illustrates the value of both the Relay Platform, as well as Selectron’s hosting services. Beginning in 2011, San Diego County implemented several Selectron solutions that helped streamline their inspection scheduling process. In 2020, the County made the decision to move their solution to the Managed Services hosting environment, allowing them to outsource infrastructure management, and benefit from Selectron’s proactive and evolving security procedures.

Problem
San Diego County began working with Selectron in 2011 to address increasing inbound call volumes that were overwhelming their customer service staff. County personnel would field calls from people wanting to schedule inspections manually, as well as from those who already had inspections scheduled wondering when their inspector would arrive.

Selectron implemented an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solution to allow callers to schedule their own inspections, as well as an Outbound solution to automatically contact permit-holders on the morning of their inspection, notifying them when to expect their inspector. These solutions helped alleviate the high volume of calls in to staff, and laid the groundwork for future savings and benefits the County would realize by migrating the solution to Selectron’s hosting environment.

Solution
Selectron’s IVR solution for permitting allowed San Diego County permit holders to schedule, reschedule and cancel inspections automatically, and check results for completed inspections. The County later implemented SelecTXT, offering users an additional method to perform the same functions using text messages. Both systems integrate with the County’s permitting database, pulling in permit information, validating business rules, and automatically updating the system with newly scheduled inspections, all without staff intervention. Selectron also implemented an Outbound notification system to notify permit-holders of their inspector’s approximate arrival time, allowing them to plan their day around their scheduled inspection.

In 2020, the County made the decision to move the solution out of their own IT environment, and into Selectron’s Managed Services hosting facility, significantly streamlining IT maintenance, improving reliability, and ultimately reducing cost. The County had previously worked with a third-party IT vendor to manage their on-premise infrastructure, making solution support and maintenance difficult and time consuming. Software vendors were forced to work with the third-party vendor, as well as the County, in order to conduct maintenance, making software updates difficult and delaying addressing any issues. With the Managed Services solution, Selectron conducts updates and maintenance proactively. Support staff are able to publish updates without burdening County administrators, and can begin addressing issues with the system often before the County becomes aware of them.

Results
The IVR and SelecTXT solutions for inspection scheduling, as well as the Outbound notification system, have significantly reduced inbound call volumes, giving Customer Service personnel more time to assist customers with specific needs that can’t be automated. It also significantly reduced hold times for inbound callers, improving the customer experience and saving time for permit-holders.  

Selectron’s hosting services have also reduced the costs associated with IT infrastructure management. The County saves thousands of dollars per year by not having to pay for physical servers, or third-party vendors to manage those servers. Moving to hosted has also reduced system outages, and the costs associated with customer systems failing.

In their own words
Kimberly Martin is an IT Project Manager for San Diego County, who first began working with Selectron during the 2011 IVR and Outbound implementation.

“Selectron made our IVR implementation easy. We have an enormous call flow because our IVR serves several different permitting departments, but Selectron was able to customize the solution to do exactly what we needed.”

She further touted the benefits of moving to hosted:

“Just based on what we were paying for our servers, we could tell we were going to save money…but even things that are difficult to quantify are huge savings. The proactive maintenance means any system issues are addressed immediately, reducing our time spent responding to customer complaints.”