Podcast • 1 min read
Modernizing the world’s largest service delivery business—with Indigov’s Alex Kouts
By bringing private market efficiency to the public sector, Indigov has reduced average constituent wait times from 80 days to a mere eight minutes.
By Maggie Mazzetti, Staff Writer
Last updated August 7, 2024
When Alex Kouts’ team tested Congressional response times to constituents, they discovered only a third of members responded at all, with average wait times exceeding 11 weeks.
“We showed this data to the House,” said Kouts, “and that was one of the reasons that we got into this process, because they wanted to do better. They genuinely knew they could do better and it was shocking to a lot of folks.”
According to Kouts, the U.S. government processes more than 53 billion service requests annually, making it the largest service delivery business in the world. Even so, Congressional offices relied on staffers to sift through thousands of messages a week, the vast majority of which are identical advocacy messages. This leads to major delays for actual constituents seeking help.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that members of Congress and their staff are helping people survive. They’re helping people thrive,” said Kouts. “And so what we wanted to do was help them sift through the noise, get to the real people, so they could focus on the constituents that really needed them.”
To do so, Indigov partnered with Zendesk engineers to build more than 50 custom applications, many of which were so successful in reducing response times that staffers asked them to slow it down.
“[They] wanted their responses to seem contemplative and in many cases they very much are,” said Kouts. “And so we actually had to figure out how to build a delay to outbound responses inside the tool.”
Hear more from Alex, including other “weird and interesting” customizations on his wish list, how Zendesk helped him meet the government’s strict data security requirements, and where he sees technologies like AI fitting into their roadmap for the future.
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