Smart Cities Pilot - Optimisation of the e-mail channel in the City of Groningen
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.
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.
Objectives
- Enhances customer satisfaction.
- Better e-mail handling within the organisation.
- Better quality answers for citizens.
- More structured e-mail entrances and communication-policy on (the use of) e-mail.
- The use of web forms on the internet channel instead of web-addresses.
Approach
- Analyse scope and determine approach.
- Determining the first steps to take
- make an e-mail protocol, and determine which are the central e-mail addresses within the Groningen municipality
- remove unnecessary e-mail addresses from the website and replace them by webforms
- make a communication-plan
Context: improving this specific channel of customer services (in line with the vision on services ‘’visie publieke dienstverlening 2014”).
Why: mails aren’t being registered, management information is lacking, we don’t know if mails are being answered properly, and if they are, we don’t know if they are answered in time, with the right quality of answer. In short we don’t have any KPIs. The ombudsman stated in her yearly report that citizens don’t get any proper answers when they address the municipality by mail. We have at least 5000 e-mail addresses within our own administration (3000 employees) and have almost 80 different mail-addresses published on our website.
Issues:
- preparing the necessary technical adjustments (ICT)
- making an inventory of the existing problems (amount of mails, amount of entrees, are they being registered etc., who’s responsible for issuing e-mail addresses , who controls them, autographing of mails, quality of the mails in terms of transparency and comprehensibility, the use of out of office reply’s)
- Making an action plan to address some issues which need action first.
The policy of the municipality is to increase the use of public transportation and upgrade customer experience.
Customer benefits:
- better quality emails (content)
- faster and better answers
- status information (e.g. when it takes longer to respond)
- receiving auto-replies
Performance benefits:
- possibly a benchmark will be held
- process descriptions will be made (2010)
Employee benefits:
- clear rules about how to handle mail
- clear process descriptions
- more responsibility
Financial benefits:
- The more our mail handling is being structured, the less time it will consume
Project benefits:
- Process-thinking. Multi channel approach (giving the same answers for every channel).
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Project_Initiation_Document_ WP_3_Groningen_email_2.pdf | 649.75 KB |