Over the past few weeks, the Polimorphic team hit the road in North Carolina to meet with county agencies and get a firsthand look at the challenges facing local government service delivery. From high call volumes and complicated software stacks to gaps in language accessibility and resource constraints, we encountered recurring themes that highlight where the right tools and the right partners can make a meaningful difference.
Here’s a look at what we learned from visiting our customers and how we see Polimorphic stepping in to help.
Our team visited a diverse set of counties and departments across North Carolina:
Any in-person time we can get with our customers is a blast. These visits offer a deeper understanding of the day-to-day operations that keep local governments running, and where the pressure points are growing.
Across the counties, many of them were facing similar challenges. Here’s a rundown of the consistent hurdles we saw.
In some counties, DSS departments make up 40% of the entire call volume. Yes, 40%! Not to mention, one in three residents will interact with DSS. Staff spend excessive time handling basic updates and fielding questions clients could potentially answer themselves—if the right tools existed.
Opportunity
Implementing an AI voice line for inbound calls could alleviate the pressure by automatically responding to status requests or simple inquiries. This switch could free up time for team members to spend on more complex cases.
Supervisors don’t always know what clients are struggling with. Without data, it’s difficult to design better communication or reduce repeat calls.
Opportunity
Provide dashboards and analytics that surface where clients are getting stuck—whether in interviews, forms, or follow-ups—and help departments understand “what clients don’t know they don’t know.”
“Many of the counties we visited had the opportunity to test our analytics. That alone allowed for them to see gaps in their content that needed to be addressed. Questions that they thought should be answered by the website were not written clearly in enough detail for the AI to capture,” said Danielle Moody, Customer Success Manager.
Staff often juggle three or more systems just to handle a single food or Medicaid application—like NC Fast, Compass, and others. In one county, 52% of staff were still in training due to high turnover and the overwhelming learning curve of siloed platforms.
Opportunity
Develop self-guided, reliable, and thorough workflows that work with mandated state systems but simplify the experience for staff and clients alike. A unified portal or workflow assistant could reduce the time-to-productivity and training burden.
Interviews for non-English speakers take up to an hour longer. In addition, teams usually have to pay to bring in a third-party translator. In one example, frontline staff even resorted to maps for clients to point to their counties, just to understand where they were calling from.
Opportunity
Introduce multilingual AI and interview bots that can handle basic intake and triage for food and nutrition benefits. These bots can reduce the dependency on limited language staff and ensure more equitable service delivery.
What's Next: From Insight to Action
This trip confirmed what we’ve heard from many of our partners: there’s no shortage of dedication or desire to improve outcomes for our local governments, but legacy systems, staffing challenges, and volume overwhelm are holding teams back.
Polimorphic is uniquely positioned to help counties across North Carolina:
And with AI, CRM tools, and flexible workflows built for government, we’re ready to meet the moment.
Want to partner with us to pilot AI in your department? Let’s talk. We’re building solutions that start small but scale with real impact, and we’re excited to collaborate with counties ready to move forward.
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