Faced with more than 1,200 percent growth in customer reports of illegal dumping and graffiti over four years, Seattle Public Utilities needed to find a way to maintain high levels of customer service for illegal dumping and graffiti reports.
While the Find it, Fix it app was making it easy for customers to report graffiti and illegal dumping, the field team did not have an easy process. Intake staff, Illegal dumping inspectors and Graffiti Rangers lacked real-time connectivity to find problems and communicate with customers. All service requests had to be processed in the office in both the Motorola CSR (customer service request) app and the work order system Maximo before crews headed out into the field. Lacking onsite system connectivity, field crews had no convenient way of learning about new requests, and often missed opportunities to respond to a new request in the neighborhood they were already in because they didn’t learn of it until returning to the office.
The CSR project team of Rodney Baladad, Deanna Wang, and Brandon Bolinger worked with Motorola and Connected Bits to develop a backend solution for field workers to access and resolve requests via mobile application developing the CSR Mobile Workforce. Motorola PremierOne CSR is the core service request tracking and workflow system used city-wide. It is built on cloud technology and hosted on Amazon Web Services and accessed via a web browser. Where before, customers could report issues and request information in person, over the phone, web and the Find it Fix it mobile app, City staff can now respond with real-time updates to requests using the CSR Mobile Workforce app in the field.
In just a year, here’s what one little app accomplished:
- SPU has managed 30 percent annual growth in reports with current staff and no reduction in performance
- SPU is saving an estimated 35 hours of labor time per week from efficiencies
- Seattle residents and visitors live in a cleaner and safer environment as field staff can take immediate action
- Customers receive real-time status updates at critical stages of the process including, intake, inspection, and resolution.
The customer service request suite of applications, with the Motorola PremierOne system at its core, empowers customers and City staff to quickly and seamlessly report and respond to a broad range of request types, from initial customer report through real-time response in the field. The FAS CSR team is keen to engage with other City service providers to explore how this functionality can benefit both them and their customer.