This article is republished from The Alliance For Innovation’s November issue of Transformations. For a link to the original publication, Click Here
How Great Service Impacts Your Community’s Financial Soundness: A Look at Palm Coast, FL
Palm Coast, a rapidly growing, new and progressive city, was incorporated in 1999. Over the past ten years, the City has seen its population more than double to 75,000 people. In order to keep up with the enormous growth and rising demand for services, the City executed a long-range comprehensive plan and an accompanying 5-Year Strategic Plan that clearly defines the City’s mission and goals—“to provide quality services, maintaining the city’s financial soundness.” The Mayor, City Council, and the Executive Team have successfully led a top-down strategic effort to maintain a high quality of life in their City even during a period of unprecedented growth. To reach their goals, the City had to find a way to deliver services in an efficient and cost effective manner; they needed to automate payments and many other non-financial transactions to increase service while decreasing manual errors and cost.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Web automation from Tele-Works have been crucial to the City’s efforts. Citizens of Palm Coast now have the opportunity to transact business without having to speak to a live person, make the trip to City Hall, or wait in line, saving everyone time and money. In fact, payment automation has led to a significant reduction in errors from manual handling of payments. Manually processed payments have been reduced to 39%. “We handled more than 70,000 automated calls through our IVR system last year, so we see IVR as a foundational component to all our automation efforts,” said Courtney Violette, IT Director, Palm Coast. The City also wanted to maintain the personal touch a live person adds to customer service. So, during business hours, citizens always have the choice to press ‘0’ to reach a live agent. This maintains the personal aspect while increasing the service options. However, a large segment of the population relies on the convenience of conducting business outside of normal office hours.
To continue meeting citizens’ need for automated services and to keep up with goals to increase automated transactions by 20% annually, the City recently introduced IVR and web services in the Building Services Department. This has already created efficiencies in inspection scheduling and posting results. In just the first 6 months of use, the system was used to schedule 4,350 inspections through the IVR and 1,530 through the web. In addition, the city is keeping it going with new initiatives for paperless e-billing and expects to reduce paper bills by 10% in the first year. This will add to the $6,000 already saved on postage and handling of delinquency mailings by the City’s outbound call program to past due customers, which has led to a reduction in shutoffs.
“I am thrilled with the results of our automation efforts, even beyond the great savings and quality service delivery, these programs are central to our green initiatives,” said Jim Landon, City Manager of Palm Coast. Automation allows for paperless billing and payments, fewer trips to city hall, fewer mailings, and a decrease in other carbon rich processes making it an environmentally friendly option. Citizens can easily access city hall without having to make special trips or take lunch time. And the City itself is seeing heavy usage translating to a quick return-on-investment. “We’re lucky to have such a special group of people both staff and vendor partners – helping us to be successful, and we hope and fully expect to see continued success going forward,” Landon commented.
To view the full Palm Coast, FL case study,Click Here.
