The Challenges Inherent in Efficient Issue Tracking Systems
Smart cities are cultivating more and more advanced environments for residents to thrive. One vital area for advancement and development is in building a relationship with the public. The best way to do this is to leverage efficient systems to make residents feel heard. One such system includes taking in issues that residents are experiencing regarding a variety of potential problems and addressing them quickly, demonstrating to the resident automatically that their issue is being resolved. SimplyCast offers the issue tracking use case helps smart cities utilize new and exciting tools for managing resident relationships.
Finding an effective way to communicate with residents is crucial for the relationship between a city and its inhabitants, but it can be quite challenging. Different residents have distinct needs and requirements. Meeting those requirements means having constant, accurate overwatch of hundreds or thousands of unique issues. Some of the roadblocks to achieving this can include:
- Communication Complications: Lines of communication can be difficult to maintain with several individuals, all with different needs or interests. In a traditional tracking solution, managing daily communication in real-time often has difficulties. Without optimizing issue tracking procedures to ensure that lines of communication are maintained and prompt, automation triggers can be carefully crafted to ensure consistent, conditional messaging is possible. This can help mitigate communication challenges.
- Disorganized Issue Requests: Even while using a digital solution, form submissions can become jumbled and difficult to keep track of without a proper organization system. Municipal staff must ensure that each issue is routed accordingly and that administrators have an overall view of all the issues reported by residents. If the dispatch system is inadequate, it makes the municipality look incapable of handling these issues and causes residents to feel that they are not being heard or listened to.
- Inconsistent Responses: One major issue with communication surrounding issue tracking is the consistency of messaging between the time of submission to the time of resolution; residents often experience a prolonged period of silence. This can cause doubts or concerns that the city is not taking their concerns seriously. Furthermore, if residents receive inconsistent responses, they might be led to believe that city staff are not knowledgeable or capable. By providing automated updates when the issue in question has progressed, residents can be kept up to date and feel secure that their issue will be resolved. Automating these ensures consistency in messaging across all issue reports.
- Failure to Adapt: Smart cities contain thousands to millions of residents. These residents are adopting new technology to varying degrees. As the communication culture changes, the city needs to be able to communicate with residents on their own terms. This requires adopting new technologies, but it also requires consistent communication with residents. Issue tracking and resolution means sending out a survey every so often to find out how residents want issue updates delivered to them, and what can be improved.
To combat these challenges, SimplyCast provides a deeply effective issue tracking application that functions well to ensure that any issues reported are followed up on and resolved as quickly as possible.
How SimplyCast’s Issue Tracking System Works
SimplyCast’s issue tracking system fine-tunes resident issue reporting through the use of automation and templating. When a resident reports an issue, the issue is then categorized and referred to the appropriate municipal department. When progress is made toward verifying the issue, identifying a fix and resolving the issue, automated messages are sent to the resident. The issue tracking system then consolidates data provided by residents and municipal staff. This ensures that data is accessible to administrators all within one central platform. By centralizing this data, response times, frequency of issues of a particular type, and other important trends can be identified and investigated.
SimplyCast’s issue tracking system successfully provides users with a deep-dive into the topics surrounding issue tracking for managing the city and the city-resident relationship with better results and deeper satisfaction.
Introducing SimplyCast’s Issue Tracking Technology
SimplyCast uses various dynamic incident response technologies that allow smart cities to address any issues in a responsive, effective way and easily adapt to any situation as it changes. We have useful tools that allow residents to report a multitude of issues. Issue reports can then be routed to the correct department and assigned to a staff member. Once the issue has been verified and work has begun, a notification can automatically be sent to the resident. This process can be repeated when the issue has been resolved.
One important tool that our platform uses is the form builder. The form builder has been updated to handle several conditional aspects of the issue reporting form. This allows residents to engage with the issue reporting without getting overwhelmed. Users will only have the sections of the form relevant to their issue displayed to them. By limiting what is visible, residents manage the issue reporting form and municipal staff do not have to sift through irrelevant data. These issues should expedite issue resolution significantly.
How SimplyCast’s Issue Tracking Tools Enhance Issue Resolution Capabilities
SimplyCast’s issue tracking solution substantially amplifies the city’s ability to respond to issue reports. Some of the ways that these tools improve issue tracking capabilities include:
- Faster response times: These automated tools expedite the city’s response to issues. Dispatchers or municipal managers can manage tasks without consequence and keep an eye on issues that have gone unresolved long-term. This enables the city’s staff to identify major issues be resolved faster.
Improved relationships: By making residents feel valued and addressing issues rapidly, the city improves its relationship with those residents. In doing so, it increases resident engagement with government and municipal services.
Efficient communication: Leveraging templated messages and advanced automation allows the city to route issue reports. By improving lines of inter-department communication, residents are provided higher quality service.
Easy Access to Information: No matter how many reports are made by residents, management and government can view the pipeline, instantly identifying bottlenecks, major issues, or high issue resolution. This allows them to adjust their approach or target specific problems for resident life.
Conclusion: The Impact of SimplyCast’s Advanced Technology on Issue Tracking in Cities
The issue tracking use case aims to bring advancements and operational improvements to smart cities. This use case provides automation technology that greatly impacts issue tracking and resolution in cities.
