Largest U.S. county modernizes citizen services with Zendesk AI

San Bernardino County, California—the largest county in the United States by area—serves nearly 2.2 million residents and manages billions of dollars in annual tax collections. Within the county, the Auditor-Controller/Treasurer/Tax Collector’s (ATC) office plays a central role.

The ATC oversees property tax collection, delinquent revenue recovery, treasury investments, and financial reporting. With nine divisions and an enormous volume of citizen inquiries, the office is at the center of the county’s fiscal and civic responsibilities.

No dashboards, no visibility, no automation

For years, San Bernardino County’s ATC customer service relied on a scattering of phone lines, website forms, and more than 20 email inboxes to serve over 2 million constituents.

“We didn’t have any kind of platform to manage all that,” recalls Chu Le, the county’s Enterprise Business Application Manager for ATC. “Requests came through phone, email, or our website, and some would sit way too long because no one knew who was managing them. We had no dashboards, no visibility, and no automation.”

The county’s leadership knew it needed a transformation and put forward a mission to provide transparent, efficient, and accessible service to millions of residents.

“Our customer satisfaction surveys told us two things: we had to automate manual processes, and we had to improve customer service,” says Le.

Finding a new way forward

To begin the transformation process, San Bernardino County ATC evaluated multiple vendors, including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Microsoft CRM. But Zendesk stood out for its flexibility, scalability, and strong AI capabilities.

“What hooked us was the Zendesk AI component,” explains Le. “We wanted to align with innovation and modernization, and Zendesk made it easy for our team to configure workflows and integrate with APIs.”

The ATC team was also drawn to Zendesk’s ability to unify communications across its 9 divisions. “We serve close to 2.2 million residents. The information we provide has to be accurate, transparent, and accessible 24/7,” notes Le. “Zendesk helps us reinforce public trust by making information easy to find and available at any time.”

Making government work better

The first order of business was to bridge the existing fragmentation across teams, leveraging the Zendesk platform to gain visibility, manage and track customer service activity, and utilize dashboards and metrics to better understand outstanding tickets and issues.

Another key area of focus was automating a great deal of the manual processes to speed up service to constituents and raise customer satisfaction levels.

Today, 60 licensed agents and dozens of light agents across ATC’s nine divisions rely on Zendesk to deliver citizen services. Communications that were once spread across 20-plus mailboxes are now visible and trackable in one centralized place.

“At the end of the day, our goal was to use technology to improve our customer outreach and engagements and provide the best service possible,” offers Le.

The new streamlined CX platform was an incredible start toward that goal, but even more value lay just ahead with the introduction of Zendesk AI agents.

AI agents drop first reply times and raise CSAT

After a little over a year on the Zendesk platform, the team added AI agents to its channel mix, rolling out the solution alongside a major county website redesign and a new property tax system.

A major success factor in implementing AI agents for the county was first building a comprehensive knowledge base. Van Nguyen, Business Systems Analyst for ATC, says the project took eight to nine months with coordination across multiple teams and many rounds of reviews.

“People think you just turn AI on, but it took months of building FAQs, testing, and continuous optimization,” explains Nguyen. “It wasn’t an easy process, but it was well worth it to ensure a successful introduction for our AI agents and support our self-service initiatives.”

Today, the county’s Zendesk AI agent retrieves answers from the knowledge base, FAQs, and website content, automatically handling inquiries and resolving tickets that previously would have consumed hours and hours of staff time.

In just the first several weeks, the AI agent provided automated resolutions to questions like “How do I pay my bill?” for more than 3,000 citizen inquiries. Le was pleasantly surprised with the quick results and the instant value provided to the county.

“On average, it was taking us 10.4 hours to close out a ticket,” says Le. “Imagine multiplying that by the number of automated resolutions. That is a great deal of time savings for our staff.”

Additionally, with the AI agent handling thousands of inquiries, the country’s average median first reply time dropped a whopping 78 percent. Now, citizens are receiving an initial reply in less than one hour.

Super quick time to value

As indicated by Le, the time to value (TTV) for the San Bernardino County ATC office has been amazingly quick. Over the course of just three months, the county has realized impressive results with the Zendesk AI agent:

• 96 percent AI accuracy: The AI agent has handled nearly 3,500 conversations with 96 percent understanding accuracy of the questions posed
• 67 percent fully automated resolutions: More than two-thirds of inquiries are fully resolved automatically without agent intervention
• Decrease in average median first reply time: 78 percent
• Average median first reply time: < 1 hour
• Massive staff time savings: With the AI agent answering more than 3,000 tickets, each typically averaging 10.4 hours of handling, thousands of hours of staff time has been saved

Citizens are already noticing the difference. “In just a short amount of time, we’ve improved customer satisfaction and shortened ticket turnaround times,” says Le. “The AI agent handles the general inquiries so our staff can spend more time focusing on complex issues.”

A vision for innovative government

Despite their success, the ATC team is not resting on its achievements to date.

Le and Nguyen have a long list of future improvements to tackle, including expanding AI to handle phone and social media inquiries, integrating additional public record systems with Zendesk, and adding multi-language support to better serve the county’s diverse population.

“Our leadership has a vision for innovative government,” shares Nguyen. “Zendesk has already made a huge impact, and we know we’re just scratching the surface.”