CPF Board delivers quality & efficient services to Singapore citizens

The Central Provident Fund (CPF) is a comprehensive social security system to enable Singaporeans to have a secure retirement through lifelong income, healthcare financing, and home financing.

The CPF Board (“CPFB”) is committed to the philosophy of providing customer service that empowers and is trusted by all. To enhance service efficiency and experience, the Board was focused on three objectives when looking at its next-gen integrated customer engagement system:

• Enhance customer engagement
• Achieve integration and scalability
• Provide agility for adapting to changes

CPFB knew they needed to address the issue of having separate systems for case management and knowledge management, which challenged the team's ability to drive efficiency, collaboration, and the delivery of exceptional customer service. They sought a unified solution to meet their goals that addressed their challenges, including:

• Separate information systems: Officers had to toggle between different systems for internal and public FAQs when composing replies to customers. This separate setup made it cumbersome and time-consuming to manage customer interactions effectively.
• Basic self-service functionalities: The original customer contact form was a basic online inquiry form that did not support dynamic interaction. Customers had limited self-help options to address straightforward issues, which led to reduced efficiency in handling common questions.
• Non-automated feedback collection methods: Efficient ways to gather feedback instantly from customers were not available. The inability to quickly gauge customer satisfaction and address problems made continual service improvement difficult.

“Our goal is to achieve an omni-channel platform that unifies our CRM and knowledge management systems and allow our Customer Service Executives to serve our members easily and quickly with greater personalisation,” explained Soh Tse Min, Group Director, Customer Relations Group.

Collaborating to ensure an agile implementation is just one of five best practices the CPFB demonstrates in their work — best practices that make an excellent starting point or “to do” list for your next digital transformation effort.

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CPFB implemented NICE 2.0, an integrated CRM and knowledge management platform. Built on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform with implementation services provided by Salesforce partner NCS, it helps to facilitate seamless service continuity while providing information directly to customers. It also offers officers a unified 360-degree view of customers across all touchpoints to help drive personalised and efficient service delivery.

Here’s how it works.

The platform's scalability supports omnichannel capabilities, including telephony, messaging, and an online portal built on Experience Cloud. It also integrates with other systems and applications within the Board and Whole-of-Government, supporting comprehensive case management. The system's agility allows for adaptation through a no-code/low-code platform, minimising the need for extensive IT resources.

Customers can access FAQs on the CPF website built on Knowledge. Unresolved issues can be addressed by submitting an inquiry through the ‘Write to Us’ form. Responses from CPF officers are sent to the member’s registered email with a direct link for further communication, if needed.

CPF officers use functions built on Service Cloud to route cases to other departments or officers for more input, manage follow-ups, and send out customer satisfaction surveys for continual service improvement feedback.

Shield was added to help bring an additional layer of security to the system and to enable compliance with government regulations.

CPFB’s implementation of NICE 2.0 was completed in just 11 months, and the team has already seen promising results:

Omnichannel portal features help the Board to monitor the effectiveness of public FAQs by providing view statistics, tracking which FAQs are accessed and gathering feedback through a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating.

Self-help options like suggested FAQs in the ‘Write to Us’ form have helped to reduce the need for direct responses, enabling CPF officers to concentrate on more complex account-specific inquiries that need personal attention. CPF officers can also view the FAQs accessed by customers and personalise their response accordingly.

The streamlined ‘Write to Us’ form has improved customer satisfaction, enhancing customer relationships. It has also helped the Board to improve internal process efficiency via structured correspondence, enabling them to decommission more than 20 email inboxes.

Enhanced search features improve work efficiency by allowing officers to quickly find relevant information across the platform.

System maintenance requirements have been reduced by leveraging out-of-the-box features, keeping customisation to less than 20%.

The team is proud to have led the first large-scale cloud implementation in the Singapore public sector. This success includes integrating Salesforce successfully with Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC) services and with its existing CPF website securely.