St. Louis, Missouri, Utilizes Cityworks for Citizen Service Requests

The City of St. Louis, Missouri, is utilizing Cityworks, the leading GIS-centric management solution, for online citizen service requests, substantially improving workflow and communication. With increased efficiency and solid results, the City is making plans to expand their use of Cityworks in the near future.Since January of 2009, the City of St. Louis has been using Cityworks to track all citizen service requests. Most requests begin at the call center with the majority routed to one of the following divisions: Refuse, Traffic, Forestry, Building, Animal Care & Control, Street Department, and Operation Brightside (graffiti removal). Because of Cityworks’ open structure, the City was able to create an online citizen webpage that mirrors the questions and answers selections used at Citizen Service Bureau (CSB). Once submitted, citizen requests are immediately inserted into the Cityworks system and provide the citizen with a request reference number.A near instantaneous benefit of this process was the ability to have CSB staff and Traffic Dispatchers working directly and simultaneously in the same system. Prior to Cityworks, dispatchers logged all of the service calls on handwritten sheets and staff had no way of knowing if they were entering a request that a dispatcher had already responded to. Dispatchers and CSB staff trained on Cityworks at the same time and began using it in sync, removing the paper process and allowing staff at each location to be aware of what the other had reported. This eliminated any unnecessary and duplicate dispatches, saving the City time and money.Similarly, before using Cityworks, the City’s Forestry division maintained three separate databases for tracking tree, weed, and debris violations. Requests were printed out from the CSB’s system and reentered into the forestry database. With Cityworks, they can now work entirely within a single system and the CSB can answer citizen follow-up calls without having to call Forestry for an update. St. Louis plans to implement Cityworks Server in the near future so that field employees can also be connected to the system.

“Thinking back two years ago, it’s hard to imagine how we ever functioned without Cityworks,” said Cindy Riordan, Customer Service Manager at St. Louis. “The amount of time spent maintaining numerous silos of data and the duplicate data entry required in doing so was really slowing down our ability to deliver services. As a result of implementing Cityworks, departments are realizing what a gold mine of data they have at their fingertips and discovering ways to use that data to manage their operations more efficiently.”

“The success St. Louis has experienced utilizing Cityworks for citizen requests is precisely what we strive for with our solutions,” states Brian Haslam, President of Azteca Systems. “Seeing and hearing about the variety of ways our clients put Cityworks to use for their individual needs is very telling. Intuitive by nature and with the flexibility to be customized in the way the users want, Cityworks unique GIS framework makes for a truly superb solution. Most other systems simply don’t have that capability.”

About St. Louis
Nicknamed the “Gateway to the West,” St. Louis is famous for its majestic Gateway Arch, which at a height of 630 feet, is the tallest manmade monument in the U.S. and receives over 4 million visitors annually. St. Louis’ 356,587 residents (July 2009) are served by the City’s Customer Service Department, which receives all the calls for City services and neighborhood concerns.