3-1-1 is a non-emergency community service telephone number directed to non-emergency municipal call centers in select cities and counties throughout the United States and Canada.
The purpose of 3-1-1 access is to divert non-emergency inquiries away from the 9-1-1 emergency service as well to provide a valuable community service to residents. Common inquiries made to 3-1-1 call centers may include the reporting of debris on a roadway, notifying city officials of broken street lights or asking questions regarding trash pick-up, bus schedules or other municipal services.
Public Sector and Government 311 Systems - Building Trust in Local Government
Improving constituent service by implementing a 311 system is one of the most direct and public facing investments to effect the way citizens view their local government. Constituent trust is cultivated or lost with each public servant interaction. Unfortunately, the negative experiences are often not visible until they have escalated to a feverish pitch or evolved to group participation and are then unloaded on an unprepared mayor, council member, city manager or city official. Public servants need better information, a more timely pulse on community issues, awareness of citizen interests and advance notice of problem events.
Most city web sites are little more than nice pictures with basic contact information. They provide no method for citizens to search for relevant information, initiate or monitor incidents, or interact with city officials. Most city departments are not well integrated and use largely manual customer service techniques (the phone pad and yellow sticky notes are the most popular incident entry forms). Many departments have differing policies and procedures and few have any type of real inter-department automated work flow processes. Ill-equipped citizens and civil servants combine to frustrate both parties and accumulate significant taxpayer costs.
3-1-1 systems integrate, automate and streamline the entire citizen interaction life cycle in order to achieve efficient constituent facing e-government and lesser taxpayer cost.
3-1-1 systems centralize constituent information in a single screen, facilitate rapid recording of the constituent's incident, provide easy to use search and automation tools to quickly deliver responses, and enable civil servants to resolve citizen requests expeditiously. 3-1-1 systems support the N-1-1 telephone dialing as well as other multi-channel access methods including walk-in, fax, postal mail, Internet and Instant Messaging (IM). A strong 3-1-1 information system must capture every contact and incident irrespective of where or when it originated and permit citizens to choose the time, place and method which suits them to make their request.