Business Process Integration
Free flow of information between departments and systems is critical for
achieving desired results. Currently, agencies are coping with increased
volume of calls and demanding situations.
Agencies need to consolidate requests from all communication channels,
including walk-in, telephone and Internet. The implementation of
customer relationship management software and solutions is complex and
involves business process re-engineering, legacy system integration and
development of service agreements among agencies that support the
effort.
Present Citizen Response Systems
Many City departments do not have a central database to track external
customer service requests. Multiple databases are not linked or shared
by other departments and agencies. Service requests are logged into data
repositories in various forms from Word documents, spreadsheets, systems
applications and individual databases. This results in an overlap of
services, wasted staff time, and delays in service request resolution.
Agencies implementing 311 solutions have articulated the following
system goals:
- Provide citizens with easy ways to send feedback, ask questions,
and obtain information
- Provide faster responses when citizens call with requests,
complaints, and questions
- Provide stakeholders with an effective management tool: real time
reports, trends and response times
- Provide consistent standardized information within an enterprise
wide system that establishes a permanent traceable record of citizen
requests
- Track and manage request information through the complete cycle
- Route request to right department automatically
- Coordinate work processes between departments at appropriate time
in the process
Need for Citizen Relationship Management (CRM) technology
A Citizen Relationship Management (CRM) system will help streamline the
collection of service request information and allow all departments to
share this data. This will reduce the amount of time necessary to deploy
services where urgently needed and allows multiple departments to
coordinate services (i.e.; street lighting, stop sign repair, weed
abatement, dead dog pick up, abandoned car). CRM allows customers and
employees to place service requests from any location. Through Web
access, customers can enter and monitor their requests.
System 311 helps to achieve the following goals:
- Improve the quality and consistency of information delivered to
citizens
- Achieve efficiencies through cross-agency collaboration
- Integrate into back-office applications
- Simplify service request tracking and delivery
- Maximize citizen-self service
- Provide analytical capability to monitor service outcomes
- Leverage visibility into cross-departmental data
- Reduce administrative costs
- Accelerate decision-making
Overview of System 311 Workflow
CRM systems can be used to track the nature and pattern of 311 calls.
This information can be used to create new public awareness programs and
make well grounded policy decisions about resources utilization, asset
management, and funding for future services. |
