The Public Service department of the City of Upper Arlington, Ohio had outgrown its electronic work order system. While the existing system had been a major upgrade over the previous paper-based workflow, after six years of use the department had reached the system’s limitations, especially as the city continued to build out its GIS.

To cover the functionality needed to track asset maintenance and work orders, Upper Arlington chose OpenGov’s Enterprise Asset Management software. As their previous solution included a service request system, Upper Arlington also needed a solution that would provide support for managing public interaction concerning infrastructure maintenance issues in the community.

Thankfully, OpenGov already had a partnership with Comcate and its CRM/311 solution that made sourcing a unified service request management system simple.

“We wanted to make sure our residents still had that customer-facing side where they could easily contact us,” said Katy Rees, Performance Analyst for Upper Arlington’s Public Service department. “We were also used to when a request comes in, it goes right over to our work order system. Those were two points that were really important to us, so the integration with Comcate just made sense.”

The Solution

With the integration between OpenGov and Comcate, data flows in two directions to create one unified system for handling all aspects of service request management.

Comcate serves as the “front end,” public-facing interface that residents use to submit issues, while OpenGov serves as the “back end” for managing work orders and tracking asset maintenance.

Once a resident submits an issue through Comcate’s public portal, the data flows through to OpenGov, where it is turned into a work order. As Upper Arlington’s crews complete work in OpenGov’s Enterprise Asset Management system, the data flows back into Comcate and triggers an automated response to the resident to let them know their issue has been addressed.

An Easy Transition for Residents

A service request management solution allows Upper Arlington to provide better options to residents who want to contact the city regarding issues.

“I think it gives people the opportunity to submit information kind of on their own terms,” said Rees. “They don’t have to call in. It doesn’t have to be during business hours or on their lunch break. With this, they can just go to the website and type it in when they’re thinking of it.”

With Upper Arlington’s old system, residents could submit issues either through a separate mobile application, or a form that lived on a singular page on the city’s website. With the switch to Comcate, Upper Arlington consolidated these options into a single mobile-responsive “widget” available on every page. The widget operates as an expandable Help Center that lives on the outer margins of a page – making it both easy for residents to spot the option if they need help, or ignore the toggle if they don’t.

During the transition to Comcate, there were some initial concerns about losing the separate mobile app. “We did have some public concerns that the app was going to go away and people weren’t going to know how to contact us anymore,” said Rees.

The department sent out an email to all residents who had previously contacted them to notify them of the change. “That email went to several hundred people, and I think I got three responses from people who were concerned about losing the app,” said Rees. Even for those three people, Rees said it ended up being a “non-issue,” especially after she showed them how Comcate offered the same look and feel of a native mobile app.

“It was a very smooth transition. It was something the residents were already used to, so we had no issues rolling that out.”

For a more in-depth look at Upper Arlington’s use of Comcate’s CRM/311 solution, check out our joint webinar with OpenGov.

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