3-1-1 will see you now... as long as you don't have a missing Business Privilege License

(In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that I have been personally involved in the issue of using 3-1-1 to perform a city service and have written about my experience and my thoughts about the experience on another forum.  As I said there, I have no desire to use my position on this blog to expedite my own process.  In fact, that would defeat the purpose of experiencing what everyone else does when seeking out a service of the city and sharing that story.  After all, if a restaurant reviewer told the maitre’d when she walked in that she was a restaurant reviewer, how do you think the food would taste?  At the end of this post you’ll see an invitation out to share your own 3-1-1 experience.)

In the interest of keeping this post under War and Peace length, I’ll sum up the experience that led me to call 3-1-1.  For a more complete version of the story, check out my contribution to this YPP thread.  The gist of it is, I downloaded the form for a business tax identification number/business privilege license and sent it in with a $250 check to get the ID and license.  The Revenue Department handles the ID.  L&I handles the license.

At some point I received a fax with my ID number and several weeks later, the check was cashed.  I never got the BP License in the mail, partly my fault since I had left a part of the form blank initially, but I also re-sent the form after filling out the new form that was sent back to me.  Months passed and still no BP license.  I called 3-1-1, thinking that this highly touted one-stop-shopping service would be able to take all of my information (business tax ID number, Social Security number, BP License invoice number, etc.), give me a tracking number, deal with L&I to find my license, and have it mailed.

I suppose my expectations were heightened by the press release that was sent out when 3-1-1 was launched on December 31st.  From that release, here are a couple of the city’s selling points for the new system.

“Residents, businesses, or visitors – no matter who you are, you can get help whenever you need it.”

311 callers and walk-ins to the 3-1-1 center in City Hall are supposed to receive a tracking number, allowing them to follow-up on their service request.  They will also be given a specific time frame in which to expect the service to be provided so that they have clear expectations of when and how their request will be answered.

As it turns out, I was a little more ambitious for the system than the developers of the system themselves.  When I talked to the 3-1-1 operator, who was very polite and picked up the call in no more than three rings, I explained my problem.  She let me know that this was a problem for License Issuance in the Department of Licenses and Inspections and told me that they are located at 1401 JFK Boulevard, on the lower level.  She also gave me the phone number for the unit but I got a sense from the way she emphasized the location that she may have been giving me a hint that it would be better to take care of this issue in person.

I called the number for License Issuance and after letting the phone ring for about 15 minutes (that’s ring, not hold music, and only 1 “our representatives are busy” message), I hung up.  I was, to say the least, unimpressed by the whole experience.

So I got in touch with few folks in the city and asked them what the deal was.

Maura Kennedy from the Mayor’s Press Office had a nice long chat with me and started off by explaining that the overall purpose of 3-1-1 was to be an “aggregator for city telephone numbers and resources.”  It should be noted that she reached out to me directly after seeing what I had written on YPP and before I started making my calls.  So everyone who thinks that the city isn’t paying attention to the blog-o-verse should take heed.  This is also a good lesson on why it’s helpful to post under your own name.  (I’m looking at you, random members of the Philly.com commenterati!)  I wonder if the City also has a Twitter account and is constantly monitoring the Twitter-verse for complaints?  You know, like Comcast does.

Essentially, Kennedy said, there are a number of people in town without Internet access or the savvy to find the right numbers to call, who can use 3-1-1 to get information, lodge a complaint or request a city service.  She explained that in the past some basic city services required calls to two or three different departments.  For those kinds of services - think your most straightforward, like a pothole - the 3-1-1 operator can take care of figuring out whether the Streets Department handles it, it’s a Water Department thing because of broken sewer, it’s on an old trolley track, necessitating SEPTA involvement or some combination of each.  (BTW, the above is my example, not hers.)  The call center operator then puts the service requests to the appropriate departments and offers a tracking number to the caller who can use that number to find out the status of the job.

However, she said, there are still a number of services that need to be handled at the departmental level.  Offering a detailed, background look at 3-1-1,  one official in the Managing Director’s office put my BP license issue into the category of “case management”   Such a problem could require some intense work by an L&I official who would need to be on the phone with me directly (or in person at 1401) to take care of it.  As it was explained to me by this official, 3-1-1 operators have a goal of resolving issues or giving information in no more than 3 minutes and then spending about 1 minute on wrap up entering information into the system.  This insures that they can quickly get to the next call and that no one who calls 3-1-1 ends up having the phone ring for more than a few seconds.  As this official put it, there is a break point between what 3-1-1 can do and what the individual departments must handle but the hope is that over time, as the city learns about what services people are requesting, that break point can shift so that more things can be handled directly by 3-1-1.

Kennedy from the press office added that in the case of L&I, that department uses some proprietary software to handle such requests and training 3-1-1 call center staff on that software just to handle the relatively few requests, like mine, would be cost prohibitive and not the best allocation of resources.  Besides, I offered, there are also probably a lot of sensitive pieces of data, Social Security numbers, tax ID numbers, etc.,  that shouldn’t probably be at the finger tips of just anyone - especially when it is information about a pesky blogger who keeps pestering the city about 3-1-1.

When I brought up the point about the L&I number that went unanswered, Kennedy admitted that “the city is not perfect” and also mentioned how 3-1-1 “dovetails into Philly Stat” to keep track of complaints.  PhillyStat is the weekly meeting chaired by Managing Director Camille Barnett whose goal is to rack the performance of city departments, and to hold accountable managers whose teams aren’t performing.  Had I called back to report that the L&I number they had given me wasn’t answered, such information could have fueled one of those sardonic, televised tongue-lashings for which Barnett is becoming famous.

Since I plan on following up on my own request by going down to 1401 JFK, I figured I’d hold off on complaining to 3-1-1 until after I see how the process goes in person.  Besides, now that I’m writing about it, I can probably do it on company time and not have to use a personal day (editor’s note: nice try, Dan-o).

But, I wondered, given the hype that accompanied 3-1-1, the Only Number We Would Ever Need, I’m probably not the only citizen who thought that the call center operator would actually do something to set a solution to my problem in motion.  Having a polite voice at the other end of the line is a nicer way to be directed into the black hole of L&I “service,” but it doesn’t really change the end result.

Everyone I talked to at the city said, No, really, the system was never envisioned to handle everything, nor do any cities with such a system use it to handle everything.  But they agreed that situations like being given a number or transferred to a number that never gets picked up is unacceptable and should be rectified as complaints are logged and brought up in the PhillyStat meetings.

For now, in Philadelphia, in this recession-challenged year, that may count as progress.  Not enough, but something.

In the coming months, we’ll continue to check in on 3-1-1 to see if that break point has shifted… to see whether the system is indeed handling more service requests.  But for now, we need to know what your experience has been with Philadelphia’s 3-1-1.  Help us out with all or some of the following questions.

What did you call about?  Did you need information or were you requesting a service?

Did you wait long before the call connected?  How polite and helpful was the attendant on the other side?

What was the final result?  Did the city perform the requested service or were you referred to one of the specific departments?  Did they have the information you were looking for?

If you had to call another department, how was that experience?

And finally, given what you knew or had heard about 3-1-1 at its launch, what were your expectations of this service and have they been met?

Let us know in the comments or send us a message on Twitter.

(And since YPP is doing some yeoman’s work securing 3-1-1 stories, feel free to share your story with them as well.)