New York City Department of Environmental Protection pioneers chatbot innovation improving employee experiences and operational efficiency

As the largest city in the US, New York City is home to 8.3 million residents, the nation’s highest population density, and 325,000 government employees – more than any other US city and most states. Given such significant scale, it’s unsurprising that the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) oversees the country’s largest combined water and wastewater utility, providing approximately 1 billion gallons of high-quality drinking water every day through roughly 7,000 miles of water mains serving homes and businesses in New York’s five boroughs. DEP also treats 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater per day, with an infrastructure totaling 7,500 miles of sewer lines, 96 pump stations, and 14 in-city treatment plants.

According to Christopher Smith, Director of Collaboration Services at DEP, the agency, which has more than 100 locations around the city, delivers a noble benefit to the public. “When you think about how water is so critical for the world, it is about quality of life,” he says. “We try to improve the quality of life of all the people in the city of New York.”

Empowering employees to embrace digital transformation

The agency’s commitment to quality of life also applies internally to DEP’s 6,000 employees, who have experienced digital transformation momentum since 2007. Smith and Michael Shum, DEP’s IT Chief of Staff, credit Cecil McMaster for serving as the agency’s visionary and transformational leader of Business Information Technology (BIT), and using Microsoft Azure and the overall Microsoft technology stack to empower employees. “Every day, our engineers and plant operators look at different variations of the data and events happening in the city…that might draw a large amount of water, to make better and smart, informed decisions,” says Shum.

DEP’s strategic plan to achieve its vision of being “a world-class water and wastewater utility, while building a sustainable future for all New Yorkers” outlines seven goals and 43 specific initiatives, one of which is to “employ digital communication to better serve our customers and employees.” With that high-level direction, DEP’s Farhan Abdullah, Director of Production Support, and Vic Kayharee, Cloud Engineer, saw the potential for AI-powered chatbots to answer employee questions on a variety of IT and human resources topics, supplementing the respective call centers. “We are an agency with 24/7/365 operations,” explains Abdullah. “Whether it’s [plant] operators, whether it’s somebody responding to a water main break at two o’clock in the morning, as an IT organization we need to provide those services to them.” 

Modernizing the user experience with chatbots

With both IT and HR service desks only staffed during regular business hours, increasing call volumes were producing longer response times and reduced employee satisfaction. “Most of the calls that we get after hours are [for] password resets,” notes Abdullah. “We saw this as an opportunity to automate this whole process,” with chatbots providing self-service employee assistance. Objectives were “to radically improve our user experience – the engagement – and our ultimate goal was to drive operational efficiencies … [with] 24/7 availability,” he adds.

In August 2019, DEP was ready to move forward on modernizing employee services through chatbots. At the time, Microsoft Teams was available in Azure for US Government, but the ability to integrate with chatbots was still gaining accreditation to meet demanding regulatory compliance standards. That led Kayharee to use the Microsoft Bot Framework and Skype for Business to develop the proof-of-concept and deploy it to employees through SharePoint Online. “One of the benefits of going with Microsoft is…there’s always new features coming out so there’s always room for us to continually improve,” Kayharee says.

Security is another DEP priority, especially as COVID-19 spread and approximately half of DEP employees transitioned to working from home. “When the pandemic hit in early 2020, we were comfortable enabling these [chatbot] services with technology such as Azure Active Directory and multifactor authentication,” recalls Abdullah. These steps allowed DEP to fulfill its security and privacy requirements. 

Achieving a first for a US government agency

Working with Microsoft partner Acuvate, the DEP team created the “Ask BIT” around-the-clock chatbot and connected it to the agency’s IT service management tool to enhance employee access to support, efficiently address queries, manage and resolve tickets, and avoid the cost of responding to after-hours requests. They also developed a similar chatbot for employees to obtain HR answers, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 added for case management. In a clever play on words, “Ask AQUA” offers 24/7 availability to a variety of HR information on policies, and pay and benefits, allowing call center staff to handle urgent employee issues instead of high volumes of repetitive inquiries for direct-deposit forms, timekeeping password resets, and more.

Final versions of both chatbots launched on schedule in October 2020, coinciding with approval of the combined chatbot-Teams capability, which was then integrated into Azure Government. Today, both Ask BIT and Ask AQUA are accelerating employee engagement, communication, and quick access to important IT and HR information. What distinguishes DEP’s chatbot success is the interoperability with Microsoft Teams along with SharePoint Online, enabling employees to simply click on the respective icon in either collaboration tool. Microsoft’s Jeff Hicks confirms that DEP was the first US government agency to incorporate custom-built chatbots in Teams. “From a government standpoint, this agency is definitely at the forefront,” he says, adding that Microsoft Teams Product Engineering was instrumental in supporting DEP’s pioneering chatbot work.

On top of chatting with either bot, Kayharee notes that users have the ability to see the status of their tickets, while BIT and HR management can review resolution progress through interactive Microsoft Power BI dashboards. “At a glance they can pull up information…right at their fingertips through Power BI,” says Smith. Abdullah describes another DEP innovation: “We also introduced human handover with Microsoft Teams. If a user is having a conversation with the bot and…requires the attention of a human, we can transition that over to a live agent directly from Teams.” 

Elevating the employee experience with greater flexibility

According to Shum, a key employee advantage of the extensive chatbot automation is greater flexibility to obtain answers in Teams, a platform embraced by the entire workforce. “No longer does a user need to be tethered to a desktop or a workstation in the office,” he says. “Our remote users can also access these chatbots on their mobile devices.”

Metrics tracked between September 2020 and April 2021 reveal that 4,300-plus DEP employees have engaged the chatbots, which have responded to more than 15,000 queries and produced faster resolution times. “Our users are able to get help when they need it,” says Abdullah, who joins Shum in emphasizing that DEP is only at the beginning of its chatbot journey to deliver expanded internal and external services. “Eventually, we would like to use this technology for our 860,000 water and utility customers to elevate their experience and take customer satisfaction to a new level,” Abdullah says. “We see many opportunities with this technology to unlock business value.”