City's help line makes 25,000 follow-up calls

Indianapolis Star 10.27.09

The Mayor's Action Center celebrated a milestone Monday: 25,000 follow-up calls to citizens who had requested city services.

The center has been pushing to make outbound calls for the past year as part of an effort to improve performance for the customer service line, which fields requests about weeds, animals, missed trash collections and other things. On a busy day, the line, which operates from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., gets more than 1,000 calls.

 

Last summer, long wait times drove the abandoned-call rate to more than 30 percent, said Sarah Taylor, the city's director of constituent services.

Since the beginning of this year, the center has averaged an abondoned-call rate of less than 2 percent, a reduction Taylor credits to improvements in technology, goal-setting for individual employees and the addition of five customer service representatives, including bilingual workers.