A municipality shifted from a five day work week to four ten hour days. The move would increase efficiency, but would impact citizens that were used to services on Friday that would no longer be offered. Concerned about its citizens the city decided to create a call center that would be available around the clock 24/7. It would resolve all possible issues over the phone. Issues that couldn’t be resolved on the phone would instantly be routed to specific departments.

Create a citizen response system with a minimal budget that would be live and operable within a three week timeline. It required the database be able to grow over time to include all the various city questions accompanied with their answers. A reporting feature will be required to track the nature and volume of calls and the actions taken to resolve them.

By implementing this solution, the system is able to substantially increase the volume of calls per week. Non critical calls are handled over the phone and logged into that citizen’s history. Issues requiring action are routed to the specific departments instantly. The requests are then tracked by the system until resolved. Managers are notified when bottlenecks arise, allowing them to take action and rectify delays. By secure login each department has access to their section in the software to manage the questions and the responses relating specifically to their department. The city now has a knowledge base of the most pertinent questions and the appropriate response for each question. Each department also manages how calls to the center regarding their issues are routed. The departments manage an on call personnel program that alerts the personnel listed in the program as calls come in.

Using workflow software, call center personnel take incoming calls and generate non 911 tasks. The product also enables the call center to perform searches using key words to find answers to citizen questions. The tasks are then auto routed to each department depending on the nature of the task. Each task is tracked and managed in order to provide department heads, elected officials and the call center with the number of calls received, the nature of the calls handled, and how quickly the issues are resolved. An on call notification feature allows unresolved problems to reach each department instantly, even to an on-call pager if required.