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On May 7th, 25 local SOCAP members gathered for lunch near San Francisco's Civic Center and then took a tour San Francisco's 311 Customer Service Center.   We were treated to an inside look at their state of the art facility staffed by 76 agents who handle 10,000 calls a day from San Francisco city residents ranging from requests for bus schedules to complaints about pot holes.

Piped-in white noise minimizes background distractions.  Clear guidelines on quality expectations are laid out for all employees.  Dual screen ergonomic workstations ensure comfort for all staff.  Specialized CRM and reference tool software developed for municipal call centers ensure agents can efficiently answer 95% of all inquiries, dispatch a resolution request to the appropriate agency and then track and measure exactly when the issue has been resolved.

Under the progressive leadership of 311 Director Nancy Alfaro (San Francisco's former County Clerk)  and her management team (Deputy Director Andy Maimoni and Call Center Manager, Kevin Dyer), San Francisco 311 has distinguished itself as an extremely desirable place to work; they typically receive hundreds of job applications for every open position.

And other city departments have discovered the benefits of 311's more efficient handling of calls that were once handled by the individual city agencies...

By the end of our visit, any thoughts that city government can't get things done right were completely eliminated.  We all agreed that this city operation represented a state of the art model in design, technology, people management and collaboration / integration with other city departments.  The results are compelling: 311 San Francisco delivers significant cost savings to the city along with improved service to its citizens.  What's not to love about that?