Customer services
Work package 3 – Customer Services and Service Platform
(leaders City of Kristiansand and the City of Kortrijk).
The municipalities and regions that are taking part in the Smart Cities project are rethinking how they deliver services to the public and which delivery channels they should use: face to face, internet, mobile, telephone, email etc.. At the same time, they are working to reorganise their internal service delivery processes and back office functions.
Work Package 3 partners are working together to develop an EU service list. This service list will provides a uniform, structured way of identifying (and providing information on) the public services that are delivered by municipalities across the EU. This will be the first trans-European service list of its kind, and is a development of the UK’s esd-toolkit.
Smart Cities partners are also working on delivering better customer contact centres. Their aim is to develop a ‘single point of contact’ for citizens, that delivers services and information to citizens by answering questions, transferring calls to relevant departments and by handling some types of service cases. The Dutch Answer methodology and framework will be transferred to at least three transnational partners in the project – local pilots are already being developed in Karlstad, Kortrijk and Leiedal. The EU service list will contribute to this work, with the development of an additional taxonomy/list of services which shows which products are suitable for delivery via a single contact point and which are not.
Leiedal, Osterholz-Scharmbeck, and Norfolk County Council have already begun to include efforts to co-design services with citizens as part of their pilot development. This is already providing the project with good information on how to involve citizens in e-services development. These examples will be key examples for the other project partners as they investigate the creation of new e-services.
The Smart Cities partners have also been working on local pilots to develop new standards and services, where either the methodology or the underlying process is potentially transferable to other partners, with a particular emphasis on developing or re-engineering e-services.
News
Projects
The municipality recognises that there are considerable problems in how it currently handles email, and the pilot sets out an approach to develop a management system to rectify this by setting up proper systems and structures.
Groningen's Customer Contact Centre pilot will ensure that citizens get better and uniform answers to questions no matter what channel they use to contact the municipality (e.g. face to face, telephone, mail, chat, letter).
Groningen want to improve how it provides services to entrepreneurs. They want to provide more information online, and to help start-ups (via the internet) and help them set up their businesses.
Norfolk County Council wishes to improve the way data are provided to individuals, groups and communities via the internet. A range of projects are developing personalised or localised web resources to ensure people find information about services that are relevant to them.
The municipality of Kristiansand is combining process description/reengineering, digital forms, data warehousing and archiving and to supply a wide range of e-services to citizens.
Lillesand will be describing 20 processes and linking them to digital handling processes by using process description/reengineering, digital forms, data warehousing and digital archiving.
The city aims to provide low threshold information free for everyone who has a mobile phone. Extending the “guidance on all aspects of life” concept (“Lebenslagenkonzept”) to a mobile access via Bluetooth is an innovative service that has not been established yet anywhere else in the North Sea Region.
The Internet-presence of the City of Osterholz-Scharmbeck currently is very static, but we plan to expand our Internet-presence into a more interactive tool for citizens’ use. Citizens will be able to apply online for passports/federal ID-cards, for building permits, for the marriage process, and for affidavits.
Integrated service delivery involves accurate and timely customer information, well-trained employees and developed channels through which customers can reach the town. This workshop will examine these topics in depth and apply them to a number of cases in municipalities in the region.
In the MijnGemeente pilot we want to personalise information on municipal websites based on information provided by users.