A city water line bursts, shooting liquid 20 feet into the air. A startled resident dashes to the phone and dials 911. Although the situation is urgent, it is not an emergency in the same context as a serious car accident or a building fire, and it is the water department rather than the police that needs to respond to the scene.

For years, city and county 911 centers were inundated with such non-emergency calls from residents uncertain whom to contact when an urgent situation occurred. That all began to change in 1997 when the Federal Communications Commission designated 311 as a national number to handle non-emergency calls. Since then, dozens of cities have established 311 call centers to alleviate the burden on 911 operators.

To help the centers fulfill their missions to provide exemplary customer service to residents, many local governments have equipped the centers with customer relationship management (CRM) software that staff can use to find answers to questions or open and track work orders. Now, by dialing one simple-to-remember number, residents can learn how to apply for a building permit, find out how late the library is open, or report a stray dog.

And, because CRM systems and 311 centers serve as clearinghouses for community problems, local officials are tapping into them to better manage services. They can see the most commonly reported problems, where they occur and how quickly departments are responding to service requests, and they can allocate resources accordingly.

All services, one number

When Houston officials began investigating 311 service and CRM software, their motivation was to reduce the number of non-emergency calls to 911 and to save residents the trouble of searching through more than 700 government phone numbers to find the right destinations for their inquiries. A call for non-emergency help typically was transferred several times, a frustrating situation for residents and time-consuming for city employees. In addition, department personnel did not have access to the same information, so residents might get varied responses to their requests.

In establishing Houston's 311 system in 2001, Gloria Bingham, 311 director, centralized customer service into a single call center and chose CRM technology from San Francisco-based Genesys to pull all city information into one location. The software manages inbound 311 calls and routes them to the appropriate agents, a feature that has been useful for many Spanish-speaking residents who are routed to Spanish-speaking agents. In some cases, agents can find the information needed to close the call in the CRM system; other times they transfer the caller to the appropriate department or create a work order that can be tracked to its eventual completion.

Presently, the average time from an answer to completion of a call is under two minutes, and a 2005 performance audit and independent customer satisfaction survey indicated more than 85 percent of constituents were strongly satisfied with Houston's 311 service. And, in the past six years, use of 311 has surged to an average of 10,000 calls per day with record highs of 21,000 during hurricanes, such as Katrina and Rita, an indication that the public has been sold on its efficiency.