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to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.What’s your question for city’s new 3-1-1?
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 10:00 am - by Its Our City Staff. Filed under: Uncategorized.
Reposted from 12/29…
The 311 Call Center in City Hall
Need a pothole filled? Need to know when to put out recycling? Need help with a barking dog? If you live in Philadelphia, soon you’ll be dialing 3-1-1. Philadelphia’s new system will provide one-stop-shopping for information on city services and is set to launch this Wednesday. But in a city that has a bad reputation when it comes to customer service, a large part of the launch involved training city workers on phone etiquette. WHYY’s Susan Phillips reports.
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Room 153 on the first floor of City Hall used to hold records but now dozens of call “agents” are sitting at desks wearing headsets and facing computer screens.
Agent: “Good morning, City of Philadelphia, this is Damon speaking. How may i help you this morning?”
This is not the type of greeting residents are used to getting from City Hall. No surliness. No wrong numbers. No long waits on hold. Each of these workers went through 4 weeks of training before picking up a phone.
A sports-like scoreboard hangs at the front of the room, instantly updating the number of people on hold and the average wait time.
Call agents keep score of wait times and callers serviced.
Rosetta Carrington Lue is in charge of implementing the 3-1-1 system. She says one of her challenges is reversing the city’s tradition of poor service.
Lue: “But learning a way to acknowledge that but work around that to improve the customer service expectations. There’s a lot of change management that takes place but with consistency and a vision people understand where you want to go.”
Agents take calls in a modern facility with information at their fingertips.
The call center has been taking calls for the past two months. It already racks up between 3500 and 4500 calls a day.
Agent: “Everybody calls. ‘I want to speak to Mike, you know, the mayor.’ All day we get those calls all day. ‘I wanna speak to Mike. I know him. Put me to his phone.’”
Damon Johnson worked the city switchboard for 12 years. He says now he has more information at his fingertips, but the calls can be a little strange.
Johnson: “A lady asked me how to cross the street on the light. Is it green or red? I think I handled it pretty well i just went through details well you cross when the light is green. And she asked if it was the green facing you or the green facing traffic and I answered green facing you but never cross into traffic. They are supposed to stop but they may not.”
The 311 service officially launches Wednesday morning. Calls will be taken twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A separate walk-in center will be open during business hours. The city hopes to have a web service up and running by the end of January. Callers will get a tracking number so they can follow what action has been taken on a complaint. The city hopes to use the 311 system to track how quickly its departments respond, and to put heat on those that come up short.
Join in the conversation
What questions would you have for 311? Share them with us in the comments.
You can also share your stories about calling the city with questions or requests for service.
December 29th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I’m looking forward to having this service and hope that people use it well! Not long ago I saw a deer in a Septa train station parking lot and spent about an hour on the phone being sent from agency to agency to find the person responsible for coming to take the deer away! It was a mess, no one knew who to call or whose responsibility it was (state? city? septa?). This would have been so helpful then!
December 29th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Hopefully people do not take this for granted. The “green/red light” call may have been strange but if the operator handled it well then everything is good to go. I believe everyone’s view of Philadelphia is changing for the better; everything from sports to customer service.
December 29th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I frequently see a building crane or a utility excavation crew whose work must block that street to vehicle traffic. Frequently I see that they have not marked the closure in a way that causes traffic to immediately detour, causing vehicles to proceed through the gap commonly allowed for local traffic, only to find that there is no alternative. So they must back all the way up to an intersection or other turn-around, or they must turn and drive back to the nearest intersection.
This occurs largely because either the orange cones have no sign indicating a detour route(!), or because they are not placed at a point where an alternative is available. I want to know why the City Streets Dept can’t immediately create a solution, or better yet why some city agency can’t put an EXCAVATION PERMIT REQUIREMENT in place that would cause the crews to create a viable solution before they even start work.
My Question: Who is EFFECTIVELY responsible for such a dumb situation? I don’t mean Who created it… I mean who-what agency is RESPONSIBLE for such urban aggravation and increased danger to citizens?
And my question: Who can I speak to that might immediately get on site with cones and/or temporary customizable signage that would fix such a problem?
Thanks!
December 29th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I sometimes see illegal “dumping” on a sidewalk corner, and it falls or blows into the street, breaks open or spills out, and thus becomes a municipal embarrassment.
One assumes it is the Streets Dept who is responsible, but that is only true when it is resident’s waste. What about apartment buildings or office buildings etc. which must engage their own garbage service? Who is responsible for that?
December 29th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
There has been a general information number, 215-686-1776, for years. I’d like to know why we need to spend the money on this pet project of changing the phone number and increasing the hours at a time when Nutter is calling for layoffs and closing libraries.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:17 am
According to the story the 215-686-1776 number is being transfered to the 311 number and so are the people.
December 30th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
@John: I believe that the 686-1776 number was just the regular switchboard, operated by folks with the same list of other phone numbers that you and I could find in the blue pages or online. 3-1-1 brings added emphasis to customer service as well as making the folks who take the call at least somewhat responsible for seeing an issue through to completion. It’s also more about the computer system in place to track the requested service/question. And I guess 3-1-1 is easier to remember. I think a lot of folks were dialing 9-1-1 with questions that they could have gone to 686-1776 with.