3-1-1 contact centers have become an increasingly vital resource for community residents to access the services they need. These centers serve as a reminder that just because a situation is non-emergent doesn’t mean it’s not urgent. Many city government contact centers are taking advantage of technology, including smartphone applications and web pages, to provide a one-answer solution for customers to submit service requests.
The City of Fort Worth, Texas implemented Motorola Solutions’ 3-1-1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) contact center solution as a way to provide transparent and encompassing responses to customers’ non-emergency service requests ranging from potholes and inclement weather to suspicious activity in a local store.
As one of the fastest growing cities in the United States with a population approaching one million residents, Fort Worth takes pride in maintaining a small-town atmosphere through interactions with customers, particularly in their contact centers and requests for service.
“PremierOne CSR is a strong, core work-order system, and amazingly, we’ve provided features to our customers and other departments that they’ve never had before.”
– Sharon Gamble, Customer Service Administrator, 3-1-1 Fort Worth Contact Center
Here are a few of the benefits the City of Fort Worth saw after implementing the PremierOne Customer Service Request (CSR) solution:
- Creating a one-stop shop: Fort Worth officials wanted to implement a one-contact solution to help their call centers not only handle the growing volume of service requests, but provide a consistent level of customer satisfaction across the entire city. Upgrading from spreadsheets and index cards to smartphone applications helped field workers provide real-time updates for customers about the status of their service requests and allowed them to offer a one-answer solution for City of Fort Worth employees and community members.
- Improving accountability: The Fort Worth contact center team recognized that the top priority was communicating back to the person submitting the service request about how it was being handled. CSR utilizes two smartphone applications, one for field workers and another for customers. The CSR Citizen Mobile app provides residents with a way to submit a service request, including the option to upload applicable photos. Field workers use the CSR Worker Mobile app to respond to work orders, access assignments, view maps and gain access to other pertinent information.
- Reducing employee training and burnout: The City of Fort Worth contact center is open six days a week and manages six intake channels for service requests, collecting about 1,200 requests per day. When CSR arrived, employees at the contact center went from having to log into five different systems multiple times throughout the day to a single application. Teams like the mowing department went from using paper and flip phones to CSR and smartphones, eliminating paper filing. Streamlining their systems not only significantly reduced the amount of training time, but the employee burnout rate as well.
- Raising the bar for “standard operating procedure”: Similar to many major cities, the City of Fort Worth experiences severe weather events such as ice storms or heat waves. Events like these happen often enough that the contact center team doesn’t classify them as an emergency so much as standard operating procedure. The contact center team has utilized CSR to help them quickly respond to events and get the word out to customers by rapidly pushing out necessary alerts and notifications.
- Building consistency: The 3-1-1 contact center team in Fort Worth knows that it’s not just about being there to answer customers’ requests for service. There’s so much that happens behind the scenes to make things run smoothly. Customers know that when they call or submit a request for service, not only will the problem be addressed, but they can see each step that was taken along the way. CSR also makes it possible to spread the uniformity of response across the city and from department to department.
Motorola Solutions partnered with the 3-1-1 Fort Worth Contact Center to tell their full story here.
