Case Study: State of Iowa achieves 10x ROI and faster constituent service with Genesys

How Iowa Built a Better Chatbot

Iowa’s state government partnered with Genesys to modernize how constituents get help online. The legacy live-chat system could handle only one conversation at a time, relied on overworked reference librarians and spreadsheets, and left call centers—already handling hundreds of thousands of calls weekly—overwhelmed, a problem made urgent by the COVID-19 surge. The state needed a scalable, consistent self-service experience across agencies and an AI-enabled knowledge base to reduce calls and avoid forcing users to dig through PDFs.

Genesys deployed chatbots, live chat, and an automated, language‑processing knowledge base with a standard chat interface across nearly two dozen agency sites; bots handle routine queries, escalate harder issues to agents, mask sensitive data, and feed analytics for ongoing improvement. The platform delivered roughly a 10x ROI, eliminated about 750 hours of call handling, handled more than 56,000 information requests across key sites, supported ~1,000 chats/month on iowa.gov and 3,000/month for the DOT (peaking at 15,000), and improved self-service scores.

State of Iowa

Dawn Connet

eGovernment Services Coordinator