AI Efficiency for California’s Busiest Tax Call Center
The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) call center manages 800,000 annual inquiries across 40+ tax programs. Axyom Assist delivers real-time AI support that saves 1.5% per call—translating to 10,000+ additional calls answered yearly and eliminating the need for seasonal staff reassignments.
The Challenge
CDTFA customer service representatives support millions of business and taxpayers across the United States. To improve efficiency, they needed to address several interconnected challenges:
- High volume, high complexity: Customer service representatives handle thousands of inquiries per day across complex tax and fee programs, each governed by detailed and frequently changing rules.
- Fragmented information and manual research: Critical guidance is spread across manuals, policies, law guides, and web resources. Representatives often had to pause conversations to search for information or consult more experienced staff, increasing call and wait times while risking inconsistent responses.
- Managing peak filing seasons: Demand surges during tax deadlines require staff reallocation and all-hands support to handle increased volume.
- Lengthy ramp-up: New agents required significant time and experience to build the subject-matter expertise needed to confidently handle complex inquiries.
Overall, CDTFA needed a solution that could improve organizational efficiencies, increase staff productivity, and provide greater customer satisfaction — without sacrificing trust, accountability, or human oversight.
The Solution
We implemented Axyom Assist, a generative AI assistant that works alongside CDTFA’s call center team across phone, chat, and email channels. For phone calls, the system transcribes conversations in real-time; across all channels, it identifies taxpayer questions and surfaces relevant answers from 16,000+ pages of official tax guidance—while representatives remain in control.
Axyom Assist redacts personal information and suggests draft responses based on authoritative sources. Representatives review, refine, and approve every answer before sharing it with taxpayers, ensuring accuracy while dramatically reducing research time.
Integrated directly into CDTFA’s Amazon Connect contact center, Axyom Assist enhanced existing workflows rather than replacing them—enabling rapid adoption with minimal disruption. Built-in safeguards protect sensitive data and ensure all responses meet state security and compliance requirements.
Key Features
Axyom Assist operates as a real-time AI research assistant embedded directly into CDTFA’s Amazon Connect contact center workflows. During live calls, chats, or emails, the system transcribes, detects intent, analyzes the inquiry, and surfaces responses grounded in official CDTFA policies and reference materials. Right from their Agent Workspace, customer service representatives can review each response before sharing it with customers.
Real-Time Support for Real-World Complexity
Whether it’s answering FAQs or handling nuanced regulatory questions, Axyom Assist uses trusted data and built-in safeguards to help agencies deliver accurate information at scale.
Context That Carries Over
Constituent chats can be passed to live agents with full context, saving callers from repeating themselves, giving agents more time to help, and allowing Axyom Assist to begin providing immediate assistance for the issue at hand.
Built for the Public Sector
Designed to meet FedRAMP and California SIMM requirements, Axyom Assist includes privacy guardrails, auditability, and complete transparency for responsible AI implementation.
Faster Agent Onboarding
New staff can ramp up quickly with in-context AI that surfaces accurate answers, reducing reliance on internal helplines and minimizing call escalations. To boost their knowledge, agents can ask questions at any time, even outside of calls and chats.
AI You Can Trust
Axyom Assist’s data curation approach reduces hallucinations. Every AI generated answer is traceable, with linked data citations and review tools for supervisor observability.
Seamless Integration, Minimal Disruption
Axyom Assist integrates directly into existing contact center platforms like Amazon Connect without overhauling workflows. Representatives work as they always have—with AI support appearing naturally in their workspace, enabling rapid adoption with minimal training.
How it Works
Axyom Assist operates as a real-time AI research assistant embedded directly into CDTFA’s Amazon Connect contact center workflows. During live calls, chats, or emails, the system transcribes, detects intent, analyzes the inquiry, and surfaces responses grounded in official CDTFA policies and reference materials. Right from their Agent Workspace, customer service representatives can review each response before sharing it with customers.
The Impact
Since implementation, CDTFA has seen improvements in:
- Time savings: Surfacing information directly in the Agent Workspace means less time spent on manual research. Agents also report that the transcripts feature saves time by allowing them to refer back to what taxpayers said, especially when speech is fast or accented.
- Improved Agent experience:Representatives describe Axyom Assist as providing valuable support during calls, improving confidence when handling complex inquiries. The tool empowers agents to focus on problem-solving rather than information hunting.
- Fewer escalations: With in-context, accurate, and grounded AI assistance, agents feel empowered and customers feel heard.
- Streamlined workflow: Agents are able to view resources referenced by Axyom Assist directly in their Agent Workspace, reducing wait and hold times.
- Onboarding timeframes: Axyom Assist’s ability as a research assistant is especially valued by new hires, helping them quickly gain expertise and confidence, as well as reaching their full productivity sooner.
In the News
The Sacramento Bee
Moving toward the future, an AI assistant is helping California collect taxes.
Business Wire
SymSoft Solutions Powers California’s GenAI Revolution with Axyom Assist at CDTFA.
Office of the Governor
Governor Newsom deploys first-in-the-nation Gen AI technologies to improve efficiency in state government.
CDTFA Press Release
California Moving Forward with Generative Artificial Intelligence in State Call Center.
Technology
Axyom Assist is built on a secure, scalable architecture designed for government environments, integrating seamlessly with existing contact center infrastructure.
- Contact center integration: Amazon Connect with omnichannel capabilities and Amazon Lex Web UI for customer-facing chatbot
- AI foundation: Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock for accurate, context-aware responses
- Data integration: Salesforce CRM connectivity for unified customer information
- Security & compliance: AWS GovCloud hosting with FedRAMP-aligned controls
- Accuracy & auditability: Proprietary RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipelines with comprehensive audit trails
Enhancing Customer Service with Generative AI
Public sector contact centers require reliable technology that ensures efficiency, accuracy, and strict compliance. Our purpose-built, predictive AI solutions are designed to address these challenges to consistently exceed service expectations.
Self-Service Discovery
Multilingual AI chat and search enable constituents to find accurate information at any time, even if the source material is only available in English, reducing the need to call for support. Knowledge bases can be updated rapidly to reflect new programs or policy changes, ensuring that constituent information remains current and accurate.
Conversational IVR
Citizens can speak naturally—without rigid menus—thanks to advanced Natural Language Understanding (NLU). AI-powered answers draw only from trusted content, ensuring accuracy and dependability.
Conversational Data Capture
Replace web forms with intuitive, AI-powered interactions that collect data through voice or chat, and send it securely to your existing data collection systems for faster processing and fewer errors.
Service for Everyone
With omnichannel, multilingual support, service is seamless across phone, chat, and SMS. Built to meet IRS Pub. 1075, FedRAMP, and WCAG standards, Axyom Assist delivers security, compliance, and accessibility by design.
Live Agent Assist
Agents get in-the-moment support with fast, compliant, and consistent information surfaced during calls or chats. With real-time transcription and sentiment analysis, AI suggested answers are provided quickly and continuously throughout the interaction.
Post-Call Summaries & Analytics
Automatically generate call summaries, track agent interaction trends, and assess AI performance through built-in observability tools to empower call center supervisors with better QA, training, and governance.
Discover
what’s possible.
We understand that bringing AI technology to your agency to improve customer service and contact center operations is a major undertaking that impacts diverse stakeholders. Our team of experts are here to support your organization through this process, from early concept exploration through implementation. Whether you have a question, would like to explore a demo, or are ready to proceed with comprehensive modernization, we look forward to talking with you.
