The Digital Hotline (DDH) is a free telephone service provided to residents in 44 of Denmark’s local councils.
Residents can call The Digital Hotline for help and advice on a range of local government topics, from pest control to passports, moving applications and sickness benefits. These enquiries are answered by a team of 350 contact centre agents who work across the participating municipalities, from Skive in the country’s west to Aalborg in the country’s north. Altogether, the hotline handles hundreds of thousands of calls every year.
The Digital Hotline was established in 2012 when it became mandatory for Danes to use digital channels to communicate with public authorities. We caught up with Torben Glock, a project leader in the City of Aarhus, to hear why Puzzel was chosen to provide the core contact centre solution for this ambitious scheme.
A ‘digital safety net’
The Digital Hotline is “digital safety net” for citizens. It’s designed to help people when they cannot find the information they need or get lost on their local council’s website, Torben explained.
Spanning multiple councils with different budgets and needs, its list of criteria for a core contact centre solution was long. All agents located across the different councils would need to be able to work and handle enquiries within the same platform. It would also need to integrate with multiple third-party systems, including the council’s comprehensive knowledgebase containing answers to almost every possible citizen question. This would enable agents to search for and provide fast and consistent responses to enquiries.
“There were several things that made Puzzel interesting to us. It was important for us to have a single web- and cloud-based system that allowed for different system integrations. We saw from the start that we could get that with Puzzel,” Torben explained.
Today, residents can also contact The Digital Hotline via an online chatbot. They can ask the same questions they would ask over the phone and get instant text-based answers. And if the chatbot cannot find a satisfactory answer, they can be transferred directly to an agent by simply entering their telephone number. The resident is queued within the Puzzel system and all chat history leading up to the transfer is presented to the agent for context.
“With Puzzel, we have the freedom to develop our business as we need to. It is an open system that allows us to buy exactly the integrations we need,” Torben said.
A ‘reliable and intuitive’ solution
The Digital Hotline remains a major success in Denmark. The scheme ensures that both small and large councils can provide fast, accessible and consistent support to citizens in a cost-effective manner.
“Puzzel’s contact centre is both reliable and intuitive. It means a lot to us because we have staff who are spread all over the country who can use the system easily,” Torben said.
Puzzel has provided The Digital Hotline with a modular software solution that can be easily integrated with different digital solutions and databases. All agents are able to work within the one, unified platform. And it is easy to obtain data on all the citizens’ enquiries – both for each municipality and generally – helping the councils to understand and make more informed decisions for their residents.
