I just came from an inspiring presentation about tools for getting your citizenry more involved in their local government.   The ideas ranged from educating citizens about the who's and why's of government via a Citizen Goverment Academy to allowing citizens to directly submit service requests via smart phone apps. 

What struck me was how many of the tools could be augmented by a centralized government contact center.  A challenge to organizing a citizen "adopt-a-road" program might be keeping track of which roads are cleaned by which local groups and which roads are available for adoption.  This data could be entered into your GIS system and made available to your centralized customer service reps, so citizens can call and find out when the next clean up day is scheduled, for example.  If they prefer to get their answers via the web, the knowledge can be added to your web site too.

A challenge to surveying your citizens for feedback is simply getting them to respond to your survey instrument - be it a mailed or online survey.  But with a centralized contact center, you could easily add the option of completing a brief survey to the end of a citizen call or in the closing of an email response to.  With many contact centers logging over 500 interactions/day, that could add up to a significant survey response rate.

One concern raised by some cities considering the smart phone apps for submitting service requests is the fear of false/fraudulent submissions by citizens "with a bone to pick with government".   In our contact center, our customer service reps review the web/phone app submissions for accuracy and to ensure the request is routing to the correct department.  This not only cuts down on false reports, but also thins out duplicate requests that can bog down an operating department in paperwork.

I've met many cities who feel they are too small to warrant setting up a contact center.  However, contact centers are scalable.  They can be a staff of 2 up to a staff of 50.  It just depends on how much info you want to push through the center.  Once you get started with a few information points, you will find your citizens love the one stop shop for all their needs, and you can grow and add to the types of questions your center handles.

There is a city tree in the park hanging low over a sidewalk and impeding pedestrian traffic.  Do I call Parks?  Forestry? Public Works? Traffic?  With a centralized call center, there's just one number to call.  And when you finish filing your request, they can tell you what time the city festival starts - so you can go have fun knowing that tree will be trimmed.