TMCnet News
Lagan Offers Hampton Citizens CRMLagan is providing city service CRM for residents of Hampton, Virginia By DAVID SIMS TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist Lagan, a provider of 311 city services and CRM solutions for local governments, today announced a contract with the city of Hampton, Va., to provide improved city services to this beachside community of 146,000 constituents. The city of Hampton will deploy Lagan's Frontlink software, a 311 solution designed to allow citizens to contact local government departments for non-emergency issues, such as failure of trash pickup, abandoned vehicles and power outages. Established in 1610, the city of Hampton has the advantage of being midway between two Hampton Roads tourism meccas -- Williamsburg and Virginia Beach. Although Hampton is a mature and established community, the city of Hampton is ahead of its time in deploying advanced technology solutions to improve service to its citizens. (This reporter is from Virginia, and of the 50 top descriptive phrases he'd use to describe Hampton, "ahead of its time" is about No. 287th.) "We were impressed with Lagan and what they had to offer to a city of our size," said John Eagle, CIO for the city of Hampton. Eagle noted that five years ago Hampton implemented "one of the first centralized call centers in the nation," whatever that means. "Lagan's Frontlink will allow us to convert our centralized call center into full service contact center that will streamline our approach to handling city services," Eagle said. "Our citizens will be able to reach us in a variety of ways -- whether by e-mail or phone or even in person." 311 city services is a pretty good idea, a non-emergency number so you don't have people calling 911 to complain about their garbage not being picked up. Working citizens don't have time to run through the daunting maze of big-city bureaucracy to find someone willing to give them an answer on city services questions, so they call 911, where somebody has to pay attention to them. In theory it's pure contact center CRM. Chicago, probably the best-managed big city in America, has run a great 311 program for the past six years. Chicago residents are able to dial one simple number to access information on local government programs and events, request City services, and check on status of ongoing projects or previous inquiries, as well as file a non-emergency police report. According to a study by The Council for Excellence In Government in addition to replacing an outdated computer system, 311 eliminated several of Chicago's smaller call centers. And the city’s determination to treat its citizens as customers – 311 even provides callers with a “tracking number” so they can follow their complaint through the system to its resolution – "has paid off in increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness: The city’s auto impound lot inventory is down by 40 percent, thanks to 311’s help in reducing processing mix-ups. The Department of Sewers reducing its response time by 83 percent since 311 was launched." Graffiti complaints are in the Top Ten of 311 calls, and in two years the city’s Department of Sanitation has halved its turnaround time from complaint to cleanup, despite getting far more requests for service since the institution of 311. Also, calls to 911 during a recent period of severe flooding were down by about a third because people called 311 instead, freeing vital space on the emergency line. It works the way a good call center would in business as well -- the system’s technological backbone makes it not just a service tool but also a data-gathering instrument for real-time reports. City administrators harvest essential information on resource allocation from 311 requests and use it as a key component in program and policy decisions, since managers can see immediately where the areas of greatest need are and which departments are working most efficiently. ----- David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100005&nm=David%20 Sims |