Summary
How Tyler Technologies applied knowledge sharing to support quick growth, increase customer satisfaction & decrease delivery costs.
Tyler Technologies is a $460M software solution provider that services public sector organizations. They address challenges in financial management, case management and taxation for local governments and schools, including the State of Kansas, Miami-Dade County, the Kentucky Department of Education, and Boston Public Schools. One of Tyler’s product areas is their court e-filing and serving platform. Through a unique public-private partnership, Tyler provides a better experience for courts and their broader community while not diverting precious tax resources from other important government services.
3 months 300% improvement in productivity 350% reduction in projected costs
The Catalyst for Change
The State of Texas Judicial System mandated that beginning January 1, 2014, all non-criminal filings would be filed electronically. This mandate would cause the case filers (more than 90,000 attorneys) and all the clerks supporting the courts across 254 counties to completely change their business processes.
In 2013, just one year prior to that deadline, the State selected Tyler Technologies as their solution provider. This new partnership led Mitchell Spence, Tyler’s vice president of support services, and Jamie Gillespie, director of operations, to examine the structure and processes that their support teams employ.
The Challenge
Tyler has been recognized for delivering highly-rated support using a high-touch model built around strong, personal relationships with its customers. Traditionally, they deliver their services in partnership with county and state courts through single points of contact on the customer side. Tyler faced a massive challenge that would not only test the scalability of their services, but also threaten to tarnish their brand if they failed.
The State of Texas partnership presented three major challenges:
- First, the number of courts they support increased substantially
- Second, Tyler would provide help not only for court officers, but also for the 90,000 attorneys utilizing the Tyler e-filing site in each county.
- Third, the rapid deployment put everything on an accelerated schedule: e-filing systemrefinements, customer training, recruiting and onboarding of new employees to support the customer. Tyler projected a call volume from the filers to reach 1100 – 1400 per day, an increased incident volume from the court clerks to the tune of about 100 more per day, and the need to hire 36 FTEs.
The Solution – Klever Accelerator
“What we appreciate most about working with the Klever team is their ability to rapidly facilitate advanced knowledge-sharing practices that spanned different departments, kept our employees and customers happy, and still delivered the expected results and then some.”
– Mitchell Spence, Tyler Technologies
How could Tyler keep the level of service their customers expect while scaling massively to serve the needs of all of Texas? And—of course—not break the bank …
In the late summer of 2013, Tyler reached out to Phil Verghis, CEO and co-founder of Klever, an innovative knowledge-sharing platform that combines tools, methodologies and collective wisdom. Phil and Klever’s other co-founders—Adam Krob and Bill Stockton—performed an assessment of the Tyler support model for the File and Serve products. The Klever team found that if Tyler’s support team optimized knowledge-sharing procedures, they could create dramatic scalability improvements, control support delivery costs, and confidently meet the State of Texas’ service requirements.
By coaching employees to manage the data that they create, organize unorganized data when they encounter it, and take accountability for data and knowledge at every step of their work process, the principles of knowledge management are scalable as data grows. By applying Klever’s knowledge management practices to its vastly expanded data sets, Tyler was able to effectively take on its new client without any significant impact on the rest of its work.
Based on the custom-designed action and improvement plan from the Klever Accelerator solution, the Tyler team was able to:
- Launch a self-service portal for the filers
- Create a way to measure knowledge use and reuse without a complex CRM package
- Identify knowledge that could reduce the volume and search-time of the most frequent and time-consuming questions
- Develop a workflow to assess the calls, determine how to prevent them from happening, and improve the customer experience in only 3 months.
The Results
With the Klever knowledge-sharing optimization program, the Tyler team achieved striking results in only 3 months:
- Support team members were able to answer 3 x more questions than before
- Self-service help went from a trickle to more than 700 court officers, lawyers and pro sefilers choosing to find answers online every day
- Tyler only hired 8 new FTEs – that meant that 28 planned positions did not have to be filled
- It changed the way the support team and the development team communicated, yielding improved collaboration and quick system refinements
- Most importantly, customer satisfaction improved to 4.6 out of 5
Tyler Technologies’ situation highlights the critical role knowledge sharing plays in any organization’s ability to deliver an efficient support program and the impact knowledge sharing can have on delivery costs and scalability. By more effectively leveraging the knowledge and information that support teams possess, they can generate significant process improvements, ensure service level objectives and drive profitability.
“Thank you, Tyler. This was not something just anybody could do. It takes a very special organization that has the resources, talent, and ingenuity. We are grateful to you for all of your efforts, and the State is much better off for it.”
– Nathan Hecht, Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Texas