In practice, because of the lack of coordination between provincial and municipal departments, the service is poorly rolled out to everyone. A Provincial government who premise their undertakings on tighter coordination with their municipal counterparts would help the help lines roll out to all Manitobans, effectively.
It might be safer to say that a review of the 311 system is in order but from my own perspective I would not shed very many tears if it was entirely scrapped. Here are some of the ideas that were tabled in discussion surrounding 311.
ReplyDeleteWe should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water so lets start by looking at the few good points 311 offers.
1) There are some benefits to having a customer service type person intercept annoyance calls allowing the higher priced parties to undertake more valuable work. This argument might have a little merit if valuable work was actually being undertaken. This argument is put forward most regularly by the parties which have benefited from being able to be insulated.
2) There is some benefit from being able to interface with a customer trained person to deflect and defuse resident wrath.
3) There is some benefit from computerizing the calls for service and having a statistical reference for management of resources to tackle the most pressing problems if they actually used it.
4) There is also some benefit to being able to track and verify call time versus response time.
5) For some callers there is a benefit from being able to get help to navigate the city’s voluminous store of information.
OK so there are also a good chunk of problems with the service.
1) Based on both the waiting time and the non-answer answers 311 successfully managed to effectively alienate the vast majority of its resident users. (who by the way are paying for it)
2) 311 has also allowed individual departments to escape front line accountability for their performance and many people fear that this ability to hide has actually decreased performance.
3) The new interface of 311 has dramatically decreased the immediacy and stridency of the incoming call leaving residents frustrated with the response and administrators untouched by any sense of urgency.
4) The very act of creating an interface diminishes the city’s responsibility to fix its voluminous data to render it user friendly.
5) The provision of 311 creates a sense of entitlement of service and probably triggers more routine calls for instance on bus schedules which previously would have been answered through pamphlets or a minimal reference to posted times.
6) There is no social interaction between the phone operator and the people delivering service leaving very little institutional memory.
7) 311 is costly and an unneeded luxury for a city with budget problems. Even if there were no budget problems it is safe to say people would prefer that 311 budget be spent on streets.
There could be some ways to decentralize 311 so that a person calling for a public works issue gets an operator actually working in public works working off the same data base and knowing the department more intimately. It is also possible to publish the internal numbers of the individuals responsible for city services. Further, it is technically possible to make sure that people actually check their messages but the mood seems to be that severe change is a better answer than incremental change.
A decent database for customer service is highly valued in the private sector. Unfortunately customer service remains something still foreign to governments. The lack of coordination between provincial and municipal departments, cries out for a broader 311 customer service system that might actually help residents. It might be worth doing but unfortunately, expanding 311 in its present condition would be a certain catastrophe.
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