Using Utility Information to Improve Team Efficiency and Citizen Satisfaction

John Bertrand

Water departments across the United States sometimes undergo herculean efforts to respond to incidents quickly and keep citizens informed during the process. The Response Management System (RMS) helps public works and utility crews respond to emergencies faster, save money, and reduce paperwork.

One city in Florida has implemented an RMS to facilitate faster response times and improve citizen engagement. This article reviews how the city uses its RMS to understand the nature of the calls coming in, save hours of overtime throughout the year, and receive more-valuable input from citizens.

Response Management System

The basic pillars of an RMS include the following features and functionalities: S Input. The RMS can take data from many sources, both customer- and infrastructure-generated. The city chooses to track and analyze customer call information in its RMS. The platform takes the text of the call and triages it using a classification engine. S Triage. The system analyzes those inputs to determine the priority of the issue. S Dispatch. High-priority issues are dispatched immediately, while low-priority issues are placed in a queue to be handled during normal business hours. S Engagement. Citizens have used the

RMS platform to provide additional information, photos, and notes of gratitude to department members for their service. S Documentation. The city uses the RMS to capture customer call data. This then allows it to identify the types of calls taken by month, day of the week, and time of day.

Triage and Dispatch

The ability of the RMS to triage data correctly is key to driving efficiencies and cost savings. For this city, its RMS uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze incoming customer reports and assign type and criticality. Looking just at customer call data, for example, the RMS can differentiate between a nonemergency question or complaint (most are billing-related) and a report that requires attention (sewer blockage, water disconnect, etc.).

Over the course of a year, the RMS classified 72 percent of calls as requiring dispatch. Of those, almost 90 percent were sent to the water team, while the rest went to the sewer team. About 28 percent of the calls were considered as nonemergency and saved the city a truck roll for those calls, which resulted in an estimated savings of 500 hours of overtime.

Figure 2. Citizen photo accompanying a report of a burst pipe.

Citizen Engagement

The city uses engagement tools built into the platform to enable citizens to provide additional information and receive status updates. In 21 percent of the incidents requiring a dispatch, citizens engaged with the city through the platform. Engagements include additional information, such as a second contact number, an address correction, or confirmation that a bill has been paid with a confirmation number. Citizens can also add photos, such as the ones provided to the city (Figures 1 and 2).

Photos and additional information provide the city with details that aren’t available through the initial call. In several incidents, that additional information has helped the city better understand how to respond, who to send, and what equipment to bring. This enables them to make those decisions up front, rather than wait for the on-call person to arrive onsite to make an assessment, saving critical minutes during a response.

Documentation: Better Insights Into Operations

By tracking call data in the RMS, the city now has better insights into the calls they are receiving, when they are receiving them, what and who is being dispatched, and how quickly team members are acknowledging incidents.

The city knows, for example, that 90 percent of dispatches are to the water crew; of those, almost half are related to disconnected service, 10 percent are related to leakages, and only 1 percent is related to water quality.

The city gets the highest volume of calls between 4 and 7 p.m., typically when people get off work. Over the course of a year, 58 percent of calls came in during those three hours and 30 percent of calls came in after hours.

The average time for the city to acknowledge an incident is one minute, and it knows who on the team falls above and below

that average. It also knows the average time it takes for employees to arrive onsite, and who falls above and below that average.

Finally, the RMS provides a heat map (Figure 3) of incidents, which gives a geographic view of the incidents and can highlight high-volume areas. The heat map can be viewed by type of incident for additional granularity.

Conclusion

As a cloud-based software, RMS works across multiple utility and public works departments. It can also facilitate transfers among departments, creating another level of efficiency. While the focus of this article is one city in Florida, numerous other case studies document large savings in time and money for cities that implement RMS.

John Bertrand, P.E., is the chief executive officer at Daupler Inc. in Overland Park, Kan. S

Figure 3. Incident heat map.