Characteristics of a 311CRM System

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.

Effectively managing citizen inquiries from request to response to timely resolution is the hallmark of good local government. 3-1-1 information and automation applications strive to deliver the following benefits.

Free-up 911 emergency lines to provide true emergency services.
Use citizen self service to make city hall available and accessible 24 by 7
Deliver consistent, timely and responsive constituent service
Provide a holistic view of the constituent relationship
Simplify services for constituents
Integrate of a wide array of local municipal services for efficient coordination and delivery
Improve quality of service while simultaneously decreasing cost of service
Increase civil servant human resources (HR) productivity and job satisfaction
Accelerate new and revised policy speed of implementation and consistent delivery
Increase first call resolution and achieve shorter delivery cycles
Immediately route incidents to their responsible party and provide visibility to manage them to closure
Reduce the cost of responding to citizen requests
Use citizen feedback mechanisms to identify improved services or areas for improvement

Key components of a 3-1-1 CRM software system include the following:

• Accelerated incident entry * Quick categorization and segmentation of incidents
• Knowledge base searching and information retrieval
• Effective work flow mapping and incident routing
• Escalation automation if cases or incidents are not resolved within designated limits
• A FAQ (frequently asked questions and answers) database
• * A diagnostics utility
• Call scripting utilities
• Computer telephony integration (CTI) - most commonly with VOIP (voice over IP)
• Outbound or push technologies to e-mail or distribute relevant messages to designated citizen groups
• Self service to permit citizens entry and monitoring of inquiries and cases
• Business intelligence analysis and reporting

3-1-1 systems have evolved from simple G2C (government to citizen) to also include G2B (government to business) and G2G (government to government). As all types of 311 call centers sometimes rely on volunteers and often incur a high employee turnover. To be effective, these CRM Systems must be extremely easy to use and deliver immediate, simple, online help for the user.

311/Citizen Services

It's no longer business as usual at public sector organizations. Citizens want fast, easy access to government services and greater return for their tax dollars. And administrations are looking for to improve service without increasing budgets. Elected officials know the quality of services can mean the difference between re-election and defeat at the ballot box.

311/Citizen Services help public sector organizations:

More efficiently manage and balance non-emergency calls
Track citizen interactions at the departmental levels
Measure department service levels against budgets
Facilitate cross-department collaboration
Measure and increase citizen satisfaction rates
Integrate Web and call center operations
Establish outbound communications capabilities.

For administrations, the benefits include:

Increased revenue with higher percentages of traffic violation fines collected and increased quality of life summonses
Strengthened citizen satisfaction with better access to information and services
Improved return on investments in existing systems
Improved collaboration across departmental lines and increased accountability at department level
Increased visibility to actual productivity and performance
Reduced call volume and workload for emergency services
Reduced overtime costs with better predictability of call volume

Results of a 3-1-1 System has the following objectives:

to deliver exceptional customer service to the public.
to enable city to track customers' demand for services. Data is linked to programs and can be used to make improvements.
3-1-1 aligns standards for excellent customer service across the City, from the corporate level through departments, business units and divisions.
to remove internal organizational barriers that may impede customer response.
Management uses 3-1-1 data to make resource allocation decisions and to improve service delivery. Residents can call just one telephone number - 311 - to access information about services provided by the City.

CRMS | Citizen Request Management System

is perfect from a global approach. It is not another CRM product of private sector which with little modifications and add-ons has been transformed in a Citizen Request Management System.

CRMS has been designed from the scratch having in mind the needs of both sides, Citizens and Government staff and authorities. So what it covers?

With CRMS Citizens can contact City Authorities in a modern and a web based user friendly environment.

City Staff can review all requests, complaints, issues, cases, suggestions and assign priorities, change status, make comments and reassign to other departments allowing citizen to have a true online view of all these steps real time. It can be used also as a channel of online communication broadcasting news, alerts, bright ideas, complaints, requests etc and whatever each Organization wants to deliver web support. It can be used as think tank system.

It has a very extensive and flexible workflow which works automatic so everyone is assigned tasks which he knows what to do and helps users to fulfill their tasks easily. By design it has strong security tools and options which increase auto protection for Spam-bots and hack attacks. Administrative alerts are send in case of such events and tracks each action. It can auto block IP's with invalid activity. It runs independent from the City Portal as a subdomain as a modern web application. It can be easily integrated with a 311 call center or a G.I.S. system.

IST Citizen Request Management System 311 is a unique web based application which holds and tracks all citizen requests and complaints via flexible web forms. It comes with build-in powerful workflow as also a unique open architecture and extensibility which allows novice users to build extensive forms.

It gives real time 3D graphs statistics to the Management and City staff which help them identify what needs special treatment.

Contact us to prepare an online demo or send you an offer with clients who already use it.

Citizens can

Send their complains in an easy way
Receive an automatic reply with their Request Number
Send additional information or make comments helping the staff in he same Request
View any time the current status, priority, department it is assigned
View all history and all actions of replies between citizen and city staff

City staff can

Handle all requests by department
View open and unclosed issues
Communicate with citizens online
Add news for emergency situations or known problems
Work in a user friendly web based environment Ajaxified
View history of any citizen request with all actions
Advanced security features