Montgomery County Government (Maryland) uses Azure AI–based Zammo.ai to support successful COVID-19 vaccination program

Conversational AI for automated telephony helps organizations relieve pressure on human contact center agents. However, building conversational AI-powered virtual assistants was a significant challenge for Montgomery County Government, Maryland, which sought an immediate solution to support the increased demand for service during the COVID-19 pandemic. Zammo.ai offered the county a no-code virtual assistant development platform to help build its own bots quickly and efficiently, enabling the county to quickly augment its two different contact centers with AI capabilities. Using Microsoft Azure Bot Service and other Azure AI tools in the Zammo.ai enhanced platform, Montgomery County has gained new conversational and analytics capabilities, helping it build more intelligent bots, faster—and even better serving its citizens during COVID-19.

“Azure and Zammo.ai helped us move quickly so we could hit the ground running during COVID-19—and keep residents’ data secure.”

Gail Roper, Chief Information Officer, Montgomery County Government

Next-gen virtual assistants

Contact centers are rapidly adopting conversational AI to act as virtual agents—helping resolve customer queries that would otherwise need to be handled by an often-overworked human agent. That’s exactly what Montgomery County Government, Maryland, sought to achieve. It wanted to deliver better engagement and service delivery for both its MC311 Customer Service Center and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to offer residents a fast, easy, comprehensive, and equitable COVID-19 vaccination registration process

Montgomery County’s Department of Technology and Enterprise Business Solutions (TEBS) moved urgently to deliver a solution and turned to the virtual-agent experts at Zammo.ai for help. The Zammo.ai no-code conversational AI development platform helps its customers deploy the latest virtual assistant technology without the need for developer expertise, quickly and efficiently.

Using Microsoft Azure Bot Service and other conversational AI tools in Microsoft Azure, Zammo.ai has further developed its platform to include turnkey telephony and conversational AI scenarios, multi-turn conversation capabilities for text and speech, and advanced analytics. Zammo.ai has also automated the complex process of retraining the machine learning language models to update content faster and improve performance.

The enhanced Zammo.ai platform has already demonstrated its worth to Montgomery County, helping it quickly deploy multi-modal voice and text chatbots for its MC311 Customer Service Center and the HHS COVID-19 vaccine registration hotline at scale.

Advanced telephony conversational AI services made simple

To open its platform to a wider range of people without specialist developer skills and improve its multilanguage processing, Zammo.ai selected Azure for its breadth of services. “Azure was an obvious choice to meet our specific natural language requirements,” says Guy Tonye, Head of Engineering at Zammo.ai. “It’s open enough for our customers to make changes, but its comprehensive data policies also give vital protections.”

Zammo.ai’s platform now uses text and sentiment analysis in Azure Cognitive Services to support natural language understanding and a voice-first architecture. “When somebody queries a Zammo.ai bot, it uses Azure services to connect with an FAQ database and predict the best answer,” says Tonye. “With Azure AI, a Zammo virtual agent doesn’t just understand the words people say, it can figure out what they really mean.”

Zammo.ai also leverages cross-platform analytics, pulling in data from customers to make continuous service improvements. The company has even created an API that enables its customers to import raw data into Azure Data Lake Storage and Microsoft Power BI to generate further insights.

Fast answers to vital questions

During COVID-19, Montgomery County Government put the Zammo.ai platform to the test. To ease the pressure on its vaccination booking line, the county built and launched a virtual assistant in just six business days, including a complex 14-step multi-turn conversation that supports 100% of inbound calls. With support from Zammo.ai, the county could quickly create multi-turn conversation experiences for citizens.

Zammo.ai uses multiple calling capabilities in Azure Communication Services and conversational authoring in Azure Bot Framework Composer to process voice or text inputs—augmented by machine learning—to better understand customer queries across multi-turn conversations.

“During COVID-19, we found that residents’ requests were increasingly complex and critical to their health and livelihoods,” says Shayna Taqi, Chief Change Officer at Montgomery County Government. “Zammo.ai helps us ease the pressure on our staff so they can focus on pinpointing what our residents need and offer rapid solutions. It’s also really intuitive, which means new staff can get up to speed in no time.”

Using Zammo.ai with Bot Framework Composer and other Azure AI services, Montgomery County Government could triage thousands of people on its vaccination line before they reached a human agent. That helped ensure that those eligible for a vaccine could get an appointment as quickly as possible and delivered useful advice for those that still needed to wait—saving significant time and resources for public health agencies and staff.

“Our platform must have seamless interoperability between systems and uncompromising cybersecurity,” says Gail Roper, Chief Information Officer at Montgomery County Government. “Azure and Zammo.ai helped us move quickly so we could hit the ground running during COVID-19—and keep residents’ data secure.” We are excited at the prospect of integrating Zammo’s technology in the future.

The County manually translated into Spanish (using a team of 5 translators on staff) and with Zammo’s support were able to build a separate Spanish workflow for its vaccine helpline, leveraging a custom language understanding (LUIS) model that continuously improves. “Montgomery County is a diverse area, so having a multilingual helpline is a must,” says Skyler Grubbs, Acting Change Management Manager at Montgomery County Government. “Zammo.ai’s platform on Azure helped us create a separate workflow for our in-house translation team. Being equitable and providing great service for everyone is one of our department’s top priorities. Any opportunity we get, we seek to leverage technology and/or in-house translation services to support residents’ varying language needs.

Democratized conversational AI

From intelligent natural speech capabilities to advanced analytics that help feed continual bot improvements, Zammo.ai has enhanced its platform’s speed and capabilities, helping customers like Montgomery County do more with less—connecting the dots between technology and use cases far faster, and fostering innovation and creativity.

And with unified bot analytics and language models in Azure now part of the platform, Zammo.ai has empowered its customers to build sophisticated bots without the upfront investment. “Without the right support, conversational AI can take years to implement properly and requires huge resources,” says Stacey Kyler, Head of Customer Success at Zammo.ai. “With Azure, we’ve democratized conversational AI, allowing companies of all sizes and budgets to build their own solid, bespoke chatbot solutions.”

Nationally recognized service delivery

The Zammo.ai platform offers significant cost-savings and other benefits for organizations looking to reduce the number of calls to their contact centers. Montgomery County has increased call deflection to its MC311 Customer Service Center and reduced abandoned calls to the Department of Health and Human Services from 18 percent to just 3 percent, with more than a 90 percent reduction in hold times. With 100 percent of callers handled by a virtual agent, the Montgomery County vaccine line has achieved an 86 percent call success rate, more than 20 points higher than most contact-center standards—with predicted savings of up to $1.5 million a year. And with contact center agents spending less time on routine queries, agents are able to spend more time providing one on one support to those who need.

The advantages for Montgomery County Government went way beyond its balance sheet. Montgomery County used its bot to identify people who were eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine within a few questions—helping people pre-register to save time and ensure they could be vaccinated as soon as they were eligible. In fact, with Azure AI and bot technologies, the county had the capacity to analyze COVID-19 vaccinations against zip codes and other demographic data, so it could run its vaccination program not just for efficiency and effectiveness, but for equity as well. What’s more, because of Montgomery County’s work with Zammo.ai, its modernized contact center was selected as a top three finalist of IDC’s 2021 Smart Cities North America Awards.

“One of our goals is to increase diversity and inclusion for our citizens,” says Roper. “With the many capabilities in Zammo.ai’s Azure-based platform, we can better understand our residents’ needs and make continual improvements to all of our services.”

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