Question: Has the COV 311 contact centre improved the delivery of municipal services?

Answer: In pursuit of answers to this question, I have gone where no one has gone before — well, hardly anyone, except for the 100+ employees of 311 and possibly a reporter whose story I’ve forgotten.

Anyway, the city invited me down to have a complete tour of the facility plus handed me large chunks of data to look at, which I will try to condense for you here. (Actually, I’ll tell you where to go look for the data yourself, because it is all available to you and you can parse it to your heart’s content.)

In response to “Has the COV 311 contact centre improved the delivery of municipal services,” I would have to say: “I don’t know completely and utterly for sure yet but it appears to have done so in some places and has the possibility for more.” I think it will take a survey of users, plus a few more years of tracking 311 use and effects to say that definitively. I’m sure there are some at city hall who think it hasn’t — that it’s just another level of bureaucracy. Others probably think it has improved things.

Just so you know the deal, I got to spend 90 minutes down there and talked mostly to Darcy Wilson, the operations manager of the centre, and Ken Bayne, the city’s director of business planning. For those who don’t know, it’s in the building under the Cambie Bridge right on the waterfront of the south shore.

Here, in point form, is what I found out:

– The service is getting about 65,000 calls a month and increasing, about half of all calls that go to the city. The other half are made by people who know exactly who they want to speak to and dial the number directly. (Like me)

– It has targets it is trying to hit in terms of calls answered (i.e. with no hang-ups) and problems addressed within six minutes. So far, it’s not always hitting the 80-per-cent target for calls answered but getting closer. You can see a monthly report showing how they’re doing on hitting targets, plus what they get the most calls about in the PDF below.

– Calls spike at certain times of the year: tax season, in advance of election, during snow, during wind, when a new program gets introduced. The day the introduces introduces organic composting to the whole city, Wilson will probably call in extra staff because there will be so many calls from people wanting to know if they can put pork-chop bones in their organic recycling bin.

– The system is better for residents in one way, in that a call can’t just go to one person’s desk and die there. If the person assigned to deal with the problem in the call doesn’t handle it, an automatic system sends it up to a supervisor within three business days. If that supervisor doesn’t handle in one business day, it goes up again in the system. I understand eventually it reaches city manager Penny Ballem, which is enough to scare most employees into settling the problem early. (Okay, that last sentence is just me fooling around. That’s not really how anything would happen at the city. Honestly.)

– Every manager gets a weekly report (called a “listening post”) listing every compliment (and they do get some, e.g. about how quickly the streets were cleared of snow) and every complaint in their department. Even though some employee below the manager is already dealing with the complaint, that lets department heads know about potential festering problems in their departments.

– The 311 people are thinking of moving at some point to an automated-forms system, so that you can fill out your own pothole-repair work order yourself! Do you think that’s an improvement?

– The system currently costs about $4.1 million a year to run and takes another $800,000 a year in IT support.

– Wilson, who started as a paramedic and went on to manage the city’s E-Comm centre, sees 311 as much more than just a call centre, but a way to analyze and improve the way the whole city delivers services.

– It handles calls for 60 of the city’s “business units.”

– People call sometimes and just give their opinions on things. 311 has created a way to record that and categorize those, in order to understand what the common themes are.

– Since 311 callers have to understand how the whole city works in order to send people to the right division or department, they get extensive training in how the whole place works. But as well, all those divisions and departments have had to explain to 311 how they usually have delivered services or resolved problems. That’s led to them changing some of the ways they did things, when they got asked by well-meaning 311 strangers: Why do you do it like this?

– You can look at the data for 311 here.

FUN FACTS

– Many of the early hires at 311 were from eBay, because it was shutting down its Burnaby operation. Think about that.

– There are hardly any prank calls, except for one pre-teen who apparently liked seeing city works trucks on the street. 311 managers had a talk with him and his parents to resolve the issue.

– When 311 first started, some departments claimed they only got 100 calls a day. But 311 would get 400 calls for that department. It seems as though the problem pre-311 was there was only one switchboard and only one operator, who could only take 100 calls a day, so everything else got dropped.

– People call to ask things like: Are we allowed to fish in Trout Lake. Why has the number of skunks dropped in Stanley Park? What are all the species of plankton in False Creek.

311_CMT_Monthly_Update_-_November_2011