Maricopa County Assessor’s Office leverages an omnichannel approach to serve customers anytime, anywhere
Meet the industry's next trailblazer.
“The goal of our mission has never been about what is convenient for our staff, but what is best for our constituents,” said Mark Kramer, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Maricopa County Assessor's Office. “We have a digital first mission to provide easily accessible services while ensuring we are still providing the ultimate customer experience, regardless of the customer type.” The Maricopa County Assessor's Office understood the need to modernize service delivery and transition the customer experience to a digital first means to improve processes and maximize the human capital available to them.
“Although we are targeting digital customers with our use of the cloud, we are indirectly enabling our teams to serve those that are not engaging with us on the platform better,” Adam Rosen said, Communication Officer at Maricopa County Assessor’s Office. “We are capitalizing on the resources we have to improve the quality of service provided, both electronically and in-person, without increasing staffing footprints or daily working hours.”
The Maricopa County Assessor’s Office is dedicated to efficiently and effectively administering all laws and regulations for the county property owners so that all ad valorem property is fairly and equitable valued. In other words, the team locates and identifies all taxable property in Maricopa County and further identifies the ownership in a fair and functional manner. The Assessor’s Office focuses on establishing value for all property subject to taxation, listing the values of all property on the assessment roll, and applying legal exemptions when appropriate.
A personalized platform approach.
Kramer, Rosen, and team had struggled with the complexity of government forms that were written in statute and quickly realized how critical it would be to simplify these processes so that residents could understand. The office envisioned a service experience that was more efficient, involved less paper, and was seen as convenient in the eyes of the customer. “We needed to be able to coordinate and connect with external agencies because our forms are regulated by the Arizona Department of Revenue. We also needed to ensure we were artfully choosing the correct language that would allow us to retain full and accurate customer information the first time,” Kramer added. “The paradigm we began is much like TurboTax. We are finding a way to simplify our publicly available forms so that customers feel comfortable to complete them, yet rendering inquiries the same way that our regulatory agencies require.”
Utilizing a platform approach allowed the team to better serve the mission and understand their customers capabilities and needs when it came to an application process— Maricopa County has a large disparity across demographics with a majority of applicants being in higher age brackets. “As an Assessor’s Office, we walk a fine line when balancing different types of customers— young and old, professional versus non, etc., and the cloud allowed us to meet our customers where they were,” said Rosen. “The first step in serving and pleasing a variety of customers is understanding how each resident wants to be served and aligning operational processes to cover all bases.”
A single source of truth across use cases.
The Maricopa County Assessor’s Office platformed a case management system to centralize public service requests, and launched several types of applications for appeals, registration, and renewals all from the same system. The applications covered real property valuation appeals, rental registration for property owners, and organizational exemptions for firms and their assets. In leveraging the cloud to serve their multi-function mission, the team introduced automation, efficiency, and effectiveness to operations and workflows that allowed for a simplified submittal of applicant information.
With an omnichannel approach, the office was able to essentially extend service hours without extending staffing because of the ability to reach customers when and where they wanted and adjust in real-time to consider volume across the different programs. “With all efforts streamlined onto one platform, we were able to scale our energy and initiatives to ensure we were providing the best service possible, through every step of the customer's journey” Kramer added. “The beauty of the platform came out in many ways— for us it was spending less time developing and more time perfecting processes, having the ability to scale and still ensure security, and integrating with other solutions to give our staff a singular set of data to manage and maintain.”
Compliant
Built out on Government Cloud Plus, Maricopa County is scaling and securing the IT infrastructure all within their CRM. Powered by Salesforce’s Customer 360 Platform, the team is enabling compliance, minimizing IT threats, and thriving in a full support ecosystem. Ultimately, modern services are being delivered through applications built with clicks, not code that are optimizing processes agency wide and personalizing the customer service experience.
The platform allowed for partnerships with agencies like the Arizona Treasurer’s Office and others alike— the team was able to interact with these separately managed entities and engage through draw and drag processes.
User-intuitive
Upon arrival at the Assessor’s Office webpage, an applicant is greeted with a large search bar to help navigate the vast majority of inquiries that could bring a resident to the site. Once completing a search, the resident will be guided to specific service options within the larger menu structure— this is where they are prompted to input their information and ultimately express their interest in agency support.
Preliminary questions are presented through Experience Cloud to help determine the type of application or registration that the customer needs to complete. Depending on how one answers these, the system will prompt future questions until the application is completed. A DocuSign is rendered at the end for residents to electronically sign and submit expressing their want and need for services.
Trackable
Innovative
Lightning API’s were added to the record management system to make data more readily available and applications more searchable. The team was receiving more accurate and comprehensive data, increasing user engagement, and generated better insights on current service operations. “Receiving a completed application may not sound like much of a win, but when a customer only has to touch the process once, and our office receives quality information from that singular engagement, that is a win for all,” Kramer said. “We were able to create applications and base our choice decisions on insight, rather than intuition. This is why we ultimately focused on how the applications would read from a user perspective and learned to translate the responses back to our language after.”
Salesforce Shield was layered on to help the Assessor’s Office stay compliant with applicable privacy and requirement laws.
Cloud for the ultimate user experience.
