The City’s Information Technology department on Sept. 24 received an award from Government Technology for recent improvements to its customer service experience, including a mobile phone app, website and customer relationship management system.
The improvements were launched in April with the goal of making requesting services easier for residents and to be able to better track requests.
According to Government Technology’s website, the award was given for “radically improving the experience of government and pushing the boundaries of how citizen services are delivered.”
“Our state and local government winners this year demonstrated that focusing on the government experience provides a foundation that played a vital role in responding and adapting to the uncertainties and disruptions of 2020,” said Dustin Haisler, chief innovation officer for the Center for Digital Government.
In addition to simplifying the process to make service requests easier, the customer relationship management system is tied to many City systems, including geographic information systems, so that customer service agents can identify duplicate requests, assign City responses to the right department and quickly address calls
“The new system can track and manage all of our interactions with customers,” said Ivan Castellanos, customer service manager for the City. “This enables us to categorize calls by service request type, council district, police beat, neighborhood, etc., so we can better understand how to allocate appropriate resources to concerned areas of the city.”
Castellanos says the customer service portal has seen increased traffic of 40 percent since the upgrade.
The City of Sacramento receives more than 1,200 311 non-emergency calls per day from its residents.