The future of federal call centers: Commercial-caliber solutions that deliver for Americans

This is the first in a three-part series for federal agencies facing pressure to consolidate and modernize call center operations. We ask experts who have worked within and alongside government programs to navigate the promises and pitfalls of commercial platforms – and share their best advice for maximizing the benefits. 

Imagine you’re a long-haul trucker with a payload of hazardous materials. 

Among other requirements, your job hinges on maintaining two national security credentials managed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). From your perspective, that’s one agency. If you need help, you’d expect to have one number to call, so you can get what you need and get back on the road. 

Unfortunately, when I stepped into the role of Director of TSA’s Maritime and Surface Credentialing program, that’s not how it worked.

At a regional transportation conference, I heard directly from a driver who’d been stuck in a parking lot dialing two different numbers, starting from scratch with every agent, repeating the same information – losing valuable time navigating government instead of doing his job.

It was an eye-opening moment for me. One that drove me to help TSA consolidate those call centers to better serve our customers. I believed then – and am even more certain now – that our government can do better.

The $20B tangle of federal call centers

Across more than 2,000 agencies, the federal government fields an immense, decentralized network of call centers to serve the American people. In addition to TSA programs like the one I managed, there are contact centers for tax filing help, Social Security and veterans’ benefits, deployment support for military service members and families, federal employee hotlines, and many, many others.

While there’s no official publication that tracks them all, the GSA’s 2020 Contact Center Playbook reported that the total annual spend on contact centers exceeds $20 billion. 

Much of this investment goes to sustaining outdated technology, as well as contract staff across highly fragmented operations. The resulting service experience often falls below what citizens expect and deserve from government.

For example, because those two TSA call centers were on incompatible technology stacks with contractually siloed staff, I couldn’t implement common sense strategies like warm hand-offs from one hotline to another or flexing agents between call centers to handle spiking call volumes – even though everyone reported to me. The taxpayer was buying capacity we could not use, while Americans waited on hold, and there was nothing I could do about it until the contracts were renegotiated.

The good news for taxpayers and agencies alike is that many of the legacy contracts tying the government to older technologies will expire in the coming year. This creates a window of opportunity for agencies to reexamine their needs, scrutinize existing platforms, and rethink their approach to operations.

Solutions that satisfy agencies and Americans 

Many agencies are already developing plans to consolidate and modernize their call center operations – replacing highly customized or proprietary platforms with modern alternatives and putting digital agents to work. Several drivers are behind this shift, including:

• Executive mandates to leverage commercial solutions and improve the usability of digital services
• Citizen-driven demand for consistent, secure service via voice, chat, web, and SMS
• Budgetary and workforce constraints 

By turning to the best commercial call center platforms such as Amazon Connect and Salesforce (including Agentforce, its industry-leading agentic AI offering), agencies can dramatically improve service delivery to every constituency they serve. At the same time, they can optimize resource allocation, making call center modernization a clear win for taxpayers.

Replacing bureaucracy with rapid results

At TSA, my end customer – the truck drivers – needed the kind of integrated experience that Thunder has created for commercial clients using Agentforce and Amazon Connect. And my program’s bottom line needed the efficiencies and flexibility those solutions offer out of the box.

At Thunder, we’ve helped more than 200 commercial companies put these solutions to work – fast and responsibly – with measurable results. 

For example, for a company focused on customer communication for healthcare, insurance, and other regulated industries, our implementation delivered dramatic improvements in call center efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. With Salesforce, their time to resolution jumped 60% and case deflection rates – meaning the caller’s issue was resolved without the need for a live agent – increased by 50%.

In a call center environment, these metrics translate directly to productivity and employee morale. And indeed, our client saw time to productivity accelerate by 70%, a 40% bump in employee satisfaction, and 35% higher retention.

Another client saw its case deflection rate jump to 46% within weeks after launch, while the number of escalations plummeted to single digits and average customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores reached 5/5. 

Results like this aren’t unusual. Our past performance includes similar outcomes for Smartsheet and many others. 

And while commercial client needs differ in some ways from those of government, they share core challenges like managing surges in call volume, boosting operational efficiency, driving self-service, and improving caller satisfaction. 

With looming deadlines for modernization, federal agencies also share the private sector’s need for accelerated delivery. Here again, Thunder shines. For the Paris Olympics, we helped the official hospitality provider for the Paris 2024 Olympics stand up a global contact center powered by AI to meet the massive demand around the event. In just 8 weeks our implementation team did what competitors said would take 6 months or more – and we did it under budget.

Modern call centers start with a modern approach

As federal leaders prepare plans to modernize their call center platforms, they must also modernize their approach to procuring the solutions that will deliver on their pressing needs. While legacy vendors may be familiar, they’re often not positioned to deliver the speed and innovation agencies need. 

Worse, these vendors tend to push agencies toward bundled procurements that combine contact center technology and contact center operations. While the bundled model may appear simple or cost-effective, it introduces serious risks, including: 

• Limiting control and flexibility
• Discouraging efficiency and innovation 
• Inflating lifecycle costs

Here again, the private sector has a better (and proven) answer. In large commercial industries that depend on high‑volume call center operations, contracts for technology and staffing/labor are typically structured as two distinct but coordinated agreements. 

What does this look like in practice? In our next installment in this series, we’ll look closer at the risks hidden within bundled contact center contracts and outline the added benefits of decoupling technology from operations.

If your agency is ready to transform its call center operations, learn more about our lean approach to making Salesforce and Amazon Connect fit for federal.