3 Ways to Engage Your Citizens, Right Now

COVID-19 was a challenging time for communities across the globe. Local government and utility organizations faced an especially difficult challenge.

Many public agencies grappled with maintaining operations while also making sure staff and customers followed public health guidelines for social distancing.

During the pandemic, Trimble Cityworks partnered with a number of solutions providers to help meet your customers where they were at—online and on their smartphones.

Whether you’re currently looking for new ways to support your employees and customers in an increasingly digitized landscape or you need a few tips to streamline your existing operations, here are three ways you can take lessons learned during COVID and 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.

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 Trimble 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, Trimble Cityworks users across the southern U.S. used Trimble 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 Trimble Cityworks is GIS-centric, you can easily use saved searches and enterprise URLs to publish Trimble 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.

This dashboard depicts the open and recently completed service requests on a map complete with tiles that calculate the numbers and a chart to depict the individual types of requests.

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 Trimble Cityworks.