These are challenging times for communities across the globe. As each of us grapples with the impact of COVID-19, local government and utility organizations face an especially difficult challenge. How do you maintain operations while also making sure staff and customers follow public health guidelines for social distancing?
Cityworks partners with a number of solutions providers to help meet your customers where they are—online and on their smartphones. Here are three ways you can improve communication and customer engagement while also taking your business processes online.
1. Business Portals
Code enforcement, licensing, and inspections are key areas of opportunity for online customer service. By setting up a public web portal for your permitting solution, you can empower customers to submit applications, pay fees, and complete outstanding items online. Public Access templates can be configured for a variety of business needs, from business inspections to health cases.
► You’ll also like: 4 Ways to Customize the Cityworks Public Access App
2. Service Request Apps
Whether you’re managing an emergency or business as usual, your citizens play an important role in reporting issues on the ground—but only if you have an effective means of streamlining and acting on their reports. A citizen engagement tool provides web and mobile apps that allow users to submit service requests with a few quick taps. With the help of the Cityworks API, you can bring those service requests directly into your asset management system and track related work. Many of these solutions include automated communication tools that update customers on the status of their service requests.
Watch the video below to learn how during Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, Cityworks users across the southern U.S. used Cityworks and Esri ArcGIS to prepare for the storms and keep their residents informed.
3. Reporting Dashboards and Hubs
Engaging customers also means providing reliable, transparent information. Because Cityworks is GIS-centric, you can easily use saved searches and enterprise URLs to publish Cityworks data to a map or an Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS. These dashboards can be used internally to keep staff and other stakeholders informed, or they can be shared publicly.
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If you are running an initiative that relies on several sources of data, ArcGIS Hub may be for you. Esri’s Hub is an easy-to-configure community engagement platform that provides a complete focused portal for information and data sharing around a specific initiative. It can be used to provide information to citizens on items like testing locations and school closings, and it can also be populated with information from Cityworks.
Want to learn more about deploying a citizen engagement tool? Schedule a demo or contact your Customer Success Manager today.
By Brent Wilson, Vice President of Sales at Cityworks