To better serve its roughly 230,000 residents, the City of Birmingham, Alabama established a 311 nonemergency call center in 2005. The 311 call center routes service requests to more than 20 different city divisions that take care of everything from trash removal and street repair to nonemergency police calls and environmental code inspections. The call center’s previous tracking system was expensive to maintain, difficult to use, and did not support how city departments worked. The city examined several solutions and selected because of its technical flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use. In addition, licensing costs for the solution were less than what established 311 software vendors demanded. With help from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner 2B Solutions, the City of Birmingham implemented the solution with custom workflows that supported each type of citizen service request. Just a few months later, the 311 call center has improved service levels and dramatically increased employee adoption of the system, enabling managers to better track performance via custom dashboards.
The 311 call center has been able to significantly improve case tracking and resolution with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. They began a follow-up call campaign in February 2010 and made contact with 694 citizens. Ninety-two percent of them said the work they requested had been completed. Looking ahead, they see Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a potential platform that could enable the entire City of Birmingham to get a comprehensive view of citizen interactions. The City of Birmingham now has a 311 call center solution that flexibly supports their unique needs while also helping to improve citizen service, a great example of the in action. More information is available in a Microsoft case study about how the .
By Alan Camp, 2B Solutions –
