Newly released data from the city’s Citizen Contact Centre could prove invaluable for departments in the municipality when it comes to future planning and trend prediction.
In August 2021, during the launch of the city’s streamlined contact system, AccessGP, the city also implemented Customer Relationship Management, which shows more in-depth data as to not only what kinds of concerns are being raised but helps break it down into departments, and other variables.
Corporate Citizen Experience Supervisor Doug McGuire says it’s helped the city get a clearer picture of the needs and requests of citizens from neighbourhoods across the municipality.
“We now get a more robust understanding of the concerns citizens do have, broken down more definitively… we are now seeing where volumes and trends,” he says.
“It helps the departments to assess resourcing when you have a better or clearer of the timing and nature of concerns, and the number of concerns is at our fingertips,” he adds.
McGuire adds that not only could it potentially streamline the work done by various city crews, but it will also allow them to have a better insight into the services they provide and the requests that citizens are making. He says they’re also encouraging residents to continue providing their constructive suggestions as to how services could be handled in the future.
“If in the conversation, they start to share ideas for their city programming to the positive, we want to be able to capture that as well, and because of the way the stream works, we can do that pretty quickly,” he adds.
Between November 2021 and March 2022, there was an average of between 4,000 and 6,000 interactions between residents and the Citizen Contact Centre, with the majority of calls coming in through the municipality’s 3-1-1 system.