Transcript: eGov: Customer Service Manager

Description: If you've ever reported a pothole or a fallen tree, you've had to contact city hall. Active Network's Customer Service Report tool enables local governments to track incidents and keep people informed.

Hi, I'm Gord Boisvert from the Active Network. Picture this: You're driving home late at night. The streetlight in front of your house is burnt out. And going along, all of a sudden, bam! You hit this big pothole in front of your house. Car is stuck. Shock wave is so huge, this tree fell over on your car. This is the problem. You want to get hold of the city, you don't know how to. This is one instance, obviously a little extreme. There's other reasons you may want to get hold of City Hall. Noise, general complaints, maybe you just have a question. "When is my garbage going to be picked up?" "When does the library open?" There's many reasons you want to get ahold of City Hall.

In this particular scenario, you're going to go into your house. You're going to phone City Hall. Someone at City Hall can take the call and they are eventually going to figure out, "It goes to public works." Public works, they'll dispatch a truck. The truck will come over here, and they will take, haul your car out, fill it up. Now this could have taken a day. It could have taken 2 days. It could have taken 3 days. Now, they come back here, they check it off. Public works is done. Problem, they can't let City Hall know, and they can't let you know. It's not that they don't want to; they just have no way to do it.

We have a solution for this, called CSR, Customer Service Request. How it works, is either over the Web, or in person, or whether you phone in. Basically, you will connect to someone in the city and it creates an incident. Now what this incident does, it's associated to you. So, as it goes through the whole flow of the process, you can keep track of it at any point, at any time, to see what's going on. What the CSR app does is it uses word flow to ask questions. "How big is the hole?" "What's the size?" "Where is the hole?" "Is that a dangerous hole?" If it is a small hole, that's a tiny thing. It may take a week to 2 weeks to fix. No one really cares. In this particular case, this is something important, and needs to be dealt with right away.

How this works is it gets hold of the public works application. It connects to it directly and it'll spawn a work order. Now that work order will get it fixed just as before. But what happens is, when they come back and check it off, is it actually connected back to the customer service request app updating the incident. The incident then pushes to you and e-mail to let you know it's done. So now, you know and are happy because you know what's happened at any time, and are informed when it's done.

The other part of this is has reporting. The reporting works on their GIS layer. GIS is Graphical Information System. It's a bunch of data the city has about the structure of the streets and all that kind of stuff. So what it'll do is, you can get nice little maps, and you can start plotting things, like holes. So, if I want to look at the holes in the northwest part of the city, you can see what is going on. So, this works for the City Manager, CIO. Anybody in the city now can look at this to see what is going on. So, it starts making them accountable for what's going on. So you are happy because you are able to keep track of what's going on. They are happy because they know what's going on. They are accountable. So all in all, the entire city wins.

« Back to video