inside view / oct 2014
HOUSTON 311
City of Houston leverages technology to
improve the lives of citizens and agents.
By Susan Hash, Contact Center Pipeline
Pipeline Articles
www.contactcenterpipeline.com
Houston 311
Susan Hash
Contact Center
Pipeline
T
here is a boom going on deep in the heart of Texas. According to data from the U.S.
Census Bureau, Houston has become the fastest-growing large city in the United States,
second only to New York for gaining new residents.
Houston’s growth has been largely fueled by a strong job market—in particular, an upswing in
STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) employment. While the expanding diverse and
technically savvy population is good news for local businesses, the rapid growth rate, combined with
the city’s property tax cap, has resulted in severely constrained operating budgets for public services.
One of the most vital services is Houston’s 311 department, the city’s information and non-emergency
service center, which offers a single point of entry to a variety of city services. The 311 Houston Service
Helpline is a 24/7 operation that handles approximately 2.1 million contacts per year, covering a
wide range of issues—from reporting a pothole to inquiries about court hearings. There are about 270
different types of service requests, and 2,600 frequently asked questions.
The Perennial Call Center Challenge: Doing More with Less
In 2011, funding cuts forced the 311 center to reduce its staff from 75 full-time agents to 55 FTEs
and 20 part-time staff. Contact center operation leaders were tasked with a daunting challenge: How
to provide information and answers quickly, accurately and efficiently to a growing citizen base using
fewer staff? The solution was a twofold strategy that began with leveraging technology to increase
engagement with citizens, according to Frank Carmody, assistant director of operations for Administration
and Regulatory Affairs, City of Houston. “We needed to rely on technology to help us bridge the gap,”
he says. Easing the workload on current staff would then allow center leaders to focus on improving
agent performance and retention.
Since the 311 staff spend a large part of their time (about 74%) responding to requests for information, the operation required a robust knowledge management system that would enable agents to
access the right information to answer callers’ questions quickly and accurately. The city implemented
the LAGAN Enterprise customer service suite from KANA, A Verint Company. The system is interactive,
Carmody says, so agents can continually improve the speed and accuracy of search results by voting
on the most relevant answers, which pushes those to the top of the list in future searches.
Technology as Force Multipliers and Workload Levelers
With the knowledge management system in place, Carmody and his team then began to look for ways
to leverage technology as a “force multiplier,” in which the citizen becomes the agent, or as a “workload
leveler” to ensure an average speed of answer (ASA) of under 60 seconds. “We recognized that, if
citizens could service themselves, it would relieve some of the pressure on our agents,” he recalls.
The first step was to redesign the Houston 311 website to ensure that citizens could quickly and
easily access the information they need. At that time, the website was not particularly user-friendly,
Carmody says. “It was very city-centric,” he explains. “If you wanted to enter a service request because
you were having a water problem, you couldn’t look under ‘W’ for water. You needed to look under ‘U’
for utility maintenance, which is the division.”
The redesigned website provides users with multiple options to find information. The most common
requests are easily accessible from the 311 home page. Users can also view a table of contents or
pull up an index of all city departments. Citizens soon will be able to access the same knowledge
management system via web self-service, ensuring that the information is up-to-date and consistent
whether they contact 311 via web or phone.
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Houston 311
FRANK CARMODY
Assistant Director of Operations for
Administration and Regulatory Affairs,
City of Houston
Prominent on the Houston 311 landing
page is an interactive map that shows all open
service requests within minutes of a request
being entered. The map is a popular first stop
for online visitors, says Carmody. Citizens who
wish to submit a service request can view the
map to see if there is an existing request, check
the status of the request and when it is due to
be addressed. Website visitors can also access
311’s interactive performance dashboards that
provide data on service request volume and
response performance, which can be filtered
by department, request type, neighborhood,
channel and status.
In addition to increasing citizen engagement, the city has found that publishing the
service response data on the website helps
to improve local departments’ accountability.
Internally, the information is used to track
each department’s performance against their
response objectives. “Every service request
has a deadline,” Carmody says. “We want to
see which departments are addressing their
service requests within the required deadline.”
The combination of a more user-friendly design and access to real-time information has substantially increased website usage—from 20,000 hits per year to about 300,000. Carmody equates the
increase in self-service transactions to an annual workload that would typically be handled by 10
agents, “which is no small matter,” he points out.
The City of Houston has also released a free mobile app that allows citizens to quickly and easily
submit service requests from their smartphones. With more than 10,000 downloads so far, the app
appeals to frequent users of the 311 site and currently accounts for nearly 6% of service requests.
While the online and mobile self-service tools have proven to be successful force multipliers, the
city also relies on other technologies and tools to help balance the workload for the 311 center
staff. Email, for instance, is one of the most basic workload levelers, Carmody says, since agents can
respond to email during the lower-volume shifts. The center is also exploring additional workload
levelers, such as providing SMS service and a call-back manager, which holds a caller’s place in
the queue without them having to stay on the line, or enables the caller to schedule a call-back at
a time more convenient to the customer.
A Focus on the Human Side of the Equation
The website and mobile self-service options have deflected a considerable amount of calls from the
contact center. Of the 2.1 million annual contacts, approximately 1.7 million were live-agent calls, the
rest were handled via the web and mobile channels. This bit of breathing space has allowed the 311
center management team to focus more resources on developing, rewarding and retaining its agents.
Importantly, the center was able to revamp its new-hire training approach. Initially, new agents
received 14 weeks of training before going live on the floor. But, as Carmody points out, “In the
theoretical classroom, handling the calls looks easy. However, it can be very stressful when they go
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Houston 311
10 MOST POPULAR
HOUSTON 311
SERVICE REQUESTS
Garbage Container Problem
Missed Garbage Pickup
Nuisance On Property
Traffic Signal Maintenance
Sewer In Residence or Business
Meter Leak
Water Line Break (Minor)
Sewer Excursion
Dead Animal Collection
Pothole
out on the floor—particularly if they have to deal with someone who is irritated,” which is an
unfortunate reality of call center work. Add to that pressure from the wide variety of inquiries
that a 311 agent has to be able to handle. In short, no amount of classroom training can truly
prepare agents for what it’s like to be on the floor taking calls, he says.
To help new agents successfully make the transition from classroom to call center floor,
contact center leaders split the training into two seven-week blocks. New-hires are trained
to use the knowledge management system and handle basic requests during the first stage.
They then spend a couple of months on the floor taking calls and applying what they learned.
Once they’ve mastered the basics, they return to the classroom for seven weeks of training
on the court system—an area that can be particularly stressful for new agents. “It’s a more
complicated system with no room for error,” Carmody says. For instance, if an agent provides
inaccurate information to a caller about if, when and where they need to show up for court, it
can result in fines or even jail time for the citizen.
In addition to training, center leaders also rolled out a peer-mentorship program to help
ease new-hires into the role. New agents are partnered with senior agents who take time each
day to sit with the trainee and coach them.
To motivate agents—both new and veterans—to continuously improve their performance,
center leaders introduced an merit order ranking system, which is based on the number of calls
an agent takes a day multiplied by his or her quality control score. For instance, if an agent
takes 200 calls in a day and has a quality control score of 80%, he or she would have a merit
order ranking of 160. Agents are eligible for various types of rewards that are associated with
their scores. For instance, during the annual shift bidding process, top-ranking agents get their
first choice of the 14 different shifts available—which is a key motivator in a 24/7 operation.
Promotions to a higher pay grade or from part-time to full-time positions are also based on
the merit order ranking. “We don’t interview our staff for promotions because every day is an
interview,” Carmody says. “If we have an opening, we offer it to the highest-ranked individual.”
A display board in the center lists the top five agents for each hour, which creates a friendly
internal competition for bragging rights. There is also a monetary incentive awarded to the top
25 agents each quarter.
Service Performance Is High and Continuously Improving
The City of Houston’s technology- and people-centric efforts are paying off. The 311 center has
reduced ASA from 111 seconds three years ago to 66 seconds today.
“We’re here to make everybody’s life a lot easier,” Carmody says. “Citizens don’t have to go
through the blue pages in the phone book to try to figure out who they should call. They can
call one number to get the answers to their questions quickly.”
The increased visibility into service request data has all departments paying closer attention
to their performance. “Every department is striving to ensure that they’re hitting their deadlines
for closing service requests,” he notes. “When performance information is out there for everyone
to see, it creates accountability.”
Susan Hash is the Editor of Contact Center Pipeline.
[email protected]
(206) 552-8831
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Houston 311
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