IRIS: Promoting civic attitudes in Barcelona through a customer service request platform

Transcription

1 IRIS: Promoting civic attitudes in Barcelona Abstract through a customer service request platform 1. Case Summary: The IRIS project is an ambitious radical innovation of the claims and suggestions public service concept needed to implement the so called Plan for Promoting Civic Attitudes in the city of Barcelona. This political initiative was started by the City Council in 2003, to challenge citizens responsiveness and involvement in civic issues as well as to secure the municipal operational alignment to this significant commitment. It enables any citizen or business to formulate claims or suggestions related to any city life aspect or any municipal service, choosing among more than 20 available (all of them free of charge) access channels. The target is to double the number of civic citizen interactions by year The commitment is not just to solve any reported issue and to take into consideration all received suggestions, but TO ANSWER all of them, recognizing and reinforcing the accountability dimension of the local administration. The IRIS project consists of a wide-scale customer service request (CSR) system implemented as en extension of the Barcelona s Contact Center to enhance the municipal capacity to overcome all existing restrictions to put an entirely different dynamic in place: public services to be driven not just by the municipal organization but by the whole citizen s involvement, so putting people at the heart of public services. The City of Barcelona s target was to integrate the treatment of citizens claims and suggestions as a mechanism to enhance civic attitudes by municipal responsiveness and commitment. Each citizen claim to be treated as a gift as an opportunity to improve quality of life and process efficiency to secure municipal accountability, making it possible for citizens to track the progress of their requests. In 2004, the system tracked more than 4 million telephone calls (with of them related to civic attitudes) and had 15 million visits in the City Council website. The service is staffed by more than 800 people (250 operators and 550 solvers), who attend 20 different channels dealing with complete geo-referenced information (6.000 streets). In words of Barcelona s mayor, Joan Clos, Barcelona is more than just a city. It is a great and growing space of exchange and optimism in which each and every one of us can devote ourselves to our own personal projects in a climate of dynamism, harmony and creativity. 2. Type of case: Initiative/program 3. Name of the case: IRISrm 4. Acronym of the case: IRIS BCN Page 1/10

2 5. Initiative/program: - Local initiative/program - Regional initiative/program 6a. Category of clients: - citizens - business - administration - civil society 6b. Public eservices for citizens: - Transport related services - Elderly related services - Disabled related services - Health related services - Social services - Services related to the policy development and decision-making process Other services for citizens: 6c. Public eservices for business: Other services for business: 6d. Administration eservices: Administration to administration service: Divert claims to other public administrations (e.g. linguistic policies, transport competencies, education, etc.) Internal administration service: 7. Standard: Name of the standard: 8. Technology: Other: Page 2/10

3 9. Status: Operation Case profile 10. Policy issues addressed by case: - Economy and labour - Police, security and justice - Infrastructure (transportation, construction and housing) - Education, science and research - Environment, agriculture and consumer protection - State and society (eparticipation, edemocracy, civil society) - Social affairs (health, pensions, social security, etc.) - Taxes and customs - General purpose 11. Levels of organisations involved: - Local - Regional Other: 12. Type of integration involved: Horizontally, at the same level of public administration 13. Types of partnerships involved: No partnerships, just one authority Other: 14. Integration / interoperability critical for the project?: Integration critical for the project Description of the case 15. Objectives achieved or anticipated and awards received: The specific objectives of the IRIS project are strictly related to the implementation needs of the Plan for Promoting Civic Attitudes, in particular with securing the municipal organization to be able to respond to the faced challenge. It enables any citizen or business to formulate claims or suggestions related to any city life aspect or any municipal service, choosing among more than 20 available (all of them free of charge) access channels. The target is to double the number of civic citizen interactions by year The Page 3/10

4 commitment is not just to solve any reported issue and to take into consideration all received suggestions, but TO ANSWER all of them, recognizing and reinforcing the accountability dimension of the local administration. This impressive commitment forced the department responsible for the contact center to make a number of infrastructural and organizational changes. A toll-free phone number was put in place ( ) as a complement of the already existing priced phone number (010) as to remove any remaining cost barrier for all services related to civic connotations. Accordingly, a number of significant reconsiderations were made regarding issues which could be explained using the ERRE+M model: HEARING: - Specifically determine WHAT ARE and WHAT ARE NOT claims or suggestions - To offer to the citizens a wide variety of structured channels together with an homogeneous treatment of any interaction, including the reception and registering of all citizens requests SOLVING: - To divert in a fastest and most efficient way all received service request, irrespectively of the used entry channel - To reinforce municipal accountability deeply involving the citizen in the completion of their service request ANSWERING: - To be able to answer EACH CITIZEN REQUEST throughout the channel chosen while the service request was created - To prioritize answering in first instance all citizens requests UNDERSTANDING: - To identify problems and to detect improvement service opportunities - To build up in real time a city map of all known incidences and claims IMPROVING: - To determine territorial and sectorial action plans as to improve citizen s satisfaction perception - To improve citizen s perception of the quality of the municipal services by facing the solution for all detected problems as reported - To specifically determine and suggest improvements of all existing municipal services. 16. Please explain shortly the problems your case had to solve and the solutions found: To be noted that the overall approach had to be able to cope which a situation suited to manage: - Up to entries a day - Integration of up to 20 different channels - A target of 4 Million potential clients (residents, visitors, the extended metropolitan area) - More than 100 services - More than thematic service instances, which categorize concepts by which citizens contact the administration - A wide geography (6.000 streets) - Different kind of contacts: incidences, claims, service requests, suggestions, complaints - More than 800 internal users - Complex specific information of each thematic instance - Completion of specific attention protocols that contact center operators have to use to inform citizens about each public service - Provisioning of a reference tracking number for each citizen request for referring lately to consult or disclaim it Page 4/10

5 - Different back channels available giving preference to those most economically viable and quick: , SMS 17. Please explain the impact made and results achieved by your case: ORGANISATIONAL - For any possible thematic area, a specific service level agreement (SLA) will be set up, and by 2007 this should be widely available for at least 80% of the service requests. By the same date the solving time will be improved by at least 50% (currently a saving of solving time of about 3 days has been achieved for the most frequently requested services). It is expected to reach a citizens quality index of about 8 out The City Council committed to integrate all the gathered information from the IRIS platform into the operational mechanism of political control on the municipal performance, this including operational control, service planning, improvement programmes and definition of future action plans and citizen participation mechanisms. - The achievements reached in solving and managing the gathered claims and suggestion will be used as a basis for the evaluation of civil servant and executives performance. All in all, the culture of a claim is a gift: and an answering organisation will be widely promoted among all of the operational levels of the municipal organisation. COSTS The deployment of the IRIS platform has provided significant savings, additionally to the improvement on the overall functionalities. There is an important saving in the generation of the service request, as the system optimizes the information gathering process. The detailed characterization of thematic service instances also makes unnecessary any manual analysis or ad-hoc diverting procedure, which is by default embedded into the thematic service definition. More than 50% of service requests are answered at first instance, so making unnecessary any other contact. Also, form those services requiring specific answer, more than 10% are already provided completely automated (by or SMS). As a final remark, about 20% of service requests have seen the solving time heavily reduced. PROCESSES The availability of the new IRIS platform management tools and processes workflow has resulted in the following impacts: - All service requests treated irrespectively of the used intake channel - Thematic details as the kernel of the operational solution, based in more than thematic areas, consolidated in 4 upper levels - Time optimization of all service request diverting, enabled by the automatic allocation to the corresponding operator depending on the chosen thematic area. - Process tracking availability - Full municipal accountability enabling citizens to freely track the progress of their requests through any of the active channels, irrespectively of the originally intake channel used - All service operators have complete access to all agreed SLAs of the for the resolution and corresponding alarm activation - The information structure has been designed as per to offer a kind of citizen relationship management system (CRM) enabling a precise treatment of a given citizen or the case of a specific Page 5/10

6 territorial location. 18. What are the main learning points of your case; can the experience gained be transferred to other institutions or cases? As part of the lessons learned, and consequently reasons that reinforce the assumed relevance of the proposed case for other cities, it can be mentioned: - An improved treatment of citizens claims and suggestions requests results in an enhanced and reinforced citizens collaborative attitude, thus providing effective support to early detect city incidences (instead of complaints). - As a first priority the municipal organisation have to positively value any received claim or suggestion. A claim is a gift. - Keep focused: the main objective remains solving, not answering. The main organisational effort should be focused on analysis resources, not on the refined elaboration of answers that should be automated as far as possible. The internal municipal workforce has early to identify the key benefits as a way to secure their complete involvement: Focus on solving, using automated answering processes - In depth analysis as a mean to improve services - Not to assume by default any limit on the information to be required to the citizen as to accept and start managing the service request, particularly on identification issues. - Sustainable multi-channel strategy: keep opening access channels to the citizen, but only those that the municipality can guarantee an efficient, controlled and effective management. - The core of the process is to generate an exhaustive service taxonomy (1.600 thematic areas are still manageable) supported by the availability of thematic searching tools. - The working model appears to be applicable to huge and complex organisations (suited for municipalities beyond inhabitants). Other areas of particular relevance contributed by the case are: - The need to gather a wider organisational involvement. - To define carefully what is and what is not an incidence or a claim, precisely outlining the applicable municipal competences. - To face an exhaustive definition of the Map of Services, identifying all responsibilities for each service. - To create a Map of Services aligned with citizen s vision and understanding, not biased by the internal structure of processes and competences. - The need to face changes gradually. - To plan and execute carefully specific communication plans and support to secure the achievement of a solid communication policy. - To secure deployment by analysing volume of service requests and living higher priority to those sectors with higher volumes (best suited to industrialize all received service requests). - To keep focus on key targets and objectives without having them affected by any specific political or communicational dimension - participative instruments not just a trouble reporting mechanism. - The service dimension has to define all in-place processes, not making possible at all the existence of any back-door mechanism. Page 6/10

7 19. Date on which the case became operational: Languages available for the use of case: Español, Catalan Others: Catalan 21. Web address of the case: (option "The City Council hears you" at "The City Council at a click!" section) Contact data first applicant RODRIGUEZ, JOSE RAMON AJUNTAMENT DE BARCELONA telephone +(34)-(93)-( ) fax +(34)-(93)-( ) website: Llacuna, 161 3a planta E BARCELONA Spain supporting applicant LOPEZ, MAXIM AJUNTAMENT DE BARCELONA telephone +(34)-(93)-( )-() fax +(34)-(93)-( )-() website: Av. Diagonal, 240 5a pl. E BARCELONA Spain Additional links none 26. Results of the case 26a: The right environment 26b. Government readiness Page 7/10

8 26c. Service use SUCCESS To precisely outline the achieved success in transformation and innovation in external facing services putting citizens and businesses at the centre, driving use and participation, a mapping against declared specific objectives is provided as follows. HEARING: >> Specifically determine WHAT ARE and WHAT ARE NOT claims or suggestions The decision was made to consider claim or suggestion any communication on a municipal service other than a consultation or associated to a transaction. The achievement of a precise characterization and exhaustive taxonomy of all possible thematic area of municipal competence enabled the provision of an operational grouping: in total more than typologies, grouped in 10 areas: - Cleaning of urban area - Maintenance of urban space - Public thoroughfare: Traffic control and security - Public transport - Taxes - Information, proceedings and citizen attention - Culture, sports and education - Social services, funeral services, health and public hygiene - Urbanism and house - Incidences on municipal information Detailed definition has been provided on service concepts of trouble, service request, suggestion, claim and gratefulness, as to be able to assign them to any thematic service area. Under these conditions all received requests could be classified accordingly to its nature, without any bias related with emotional misleading interpretations. Specific attention protocols have been defined for those thematic areas that require the provision of additional information to be given to the citizen, as part of the answer. Integrated communication with other public administrations and private companies has been put in place as to facilitate and ease the transfer of trouble and claims of their competence. >> To offer to the citizens a wide variety of structured channels together with an homogeneous treatment of any interaction, including the reception and registering of all citizens requests. All requested information in any of the active channels is homogenous and is stored in a common shared database. Each service request entry is given a unique reference number. The possible intake channels are: - Civic phone number (toll-free): Internet: The City Council hears you? - Intranet: The City Council eyes? - 11 Offices of citizen care Page 8/10

9 - Monthly initiatives of participative citizenship: public hearings and borough councils. - Mobile devices of outdoor crews. Professionalized structured channels and participative citizenship initiatives are given priority, as the register and classification are carried out in just one step. Structured channels: Civic phone number (toll-free), Internet, Intranet, 11 offices of citizen care, participative citizenship mechanisms (10 monthly public hearings geographically distributed). SOLVING: >> To divert in a fastest and most efficient way all received service request, irrespectively of the used entry channel The existence of a detailed taxonomy of all possible service request instances (1.600 thematic areas over more than 100 municipal services) allows for an automatic allocation to the designed operator responsible for its resolution within the organization (800 technicians). These technicians could be City Council employees or workers from subcontracted firms. Having specific information of each problem (i.e., location, type of container, employee who gave a service, line of transport...) allows for an automated detection of service request groupings (per thematic area, location or time frame) in order to consider shared common corrective actions. >> To reinforce municipal accountability deeply involving the citizen in the completion of their service request Returning a reference code allows citizens to ask for its situation contact lately or for canceling or disclaiming its solution. This functionality contributes significantly to the overall accountability of the process. ANSWERING: >> To be able to answer each citizen request throughout the channel chosen while the service request was created Offering several standard answer choices to the citizen (multimodality: mail, SMS, letter, telephone call) for communicating the result of his request solving. >> To prioritize answering in the first instance all citizens requests Disclaiming an attention protocol that call center operators use to inform citizen of specific aspects of selected thematic. Each thematic area has defined specific SLAs (service level agreement) that facilitates an early communication (at first interaction) of the envisaged time estimation to solve the problem. UNDERSTANDING: >> To identify problems and to detect improvement service opportunities Page 9/10

10 The provided system information allows to systematically identifying processes either for its localisation, for its thematic nature or by the coincidence on the reporting citizen. Those processes are immediately transferred for its prompt resolution or to avoid its recurrent existence. >> To build up in real time a city map of all known incidences and claims The geo-spatial representation of active service requests allows for a visual early identification of clustered situations (thematic or territorial), thus to objectively know citizens worrying based on tangible data, not perceptions. IMPROVING: >> To determine territorial and sectorial action plans as to improve citizen s satisfaction perception The existing information allows for the transfer into political targets specific action plans to deal with known problems as reported by the citizens, thus helping to a correct prioritization of decisions on investment or resource optimization. >> To improve citizen s perception of the quality of the municipal services by facing the solution for all detected problems as reported The main issue to improve citizen s perception of the quality of the municipal services is by providing feedback to them answering specifically how and when their service request was solved. Additionally the overall framework allows fir specific communication campaigns on particular civil actions. 26d. Impact Page 10/10