The city of Santa Monica digitized citizen engagement

The city of Santa Monica, Calif., is one of the busiest beach towns in the world. The city’s population is 93,000, but it grows to an estimated 250,000 during the day. With the massive crowd from tourism filling our beaches, dining in our restaurants and shopping in our mall, it can be a challenge to serve the citizens who call this coastal town home.

Before the pandemic, we were using a legacy system that allowed our citizens to submit community requests. The system, however, lacked workflow integration and was not ideal. When the pandemic hit, and the state issued stay-at-home orders, our budget decreased. The pandemic led to fewer tax dollars and tourism, cutting our funds by 20 to 25 percent. It became clear we needed to find a way to digitally support city operations with a more robust and full-service request and workflow management system.

Becoming more connected
We ultimately decided to work with a ServiceNow partner, NewRocket, to help create a better environment to connect our staff and improve our service for our community. We first focused on how we could create an even closer connection with our citizens. Then, we decided that creating our ServiceNow integrated app levering our existing ServiceNow infrastructure would allow us to engage our citizens and interact with them in new, more convenient ways.

While setting up the app, we wanted to carry over areas from our legacy processes that we felt were succeeding while moving away from the inflexible and outdated technology of our previous application. For example, our community request intake system met the basic needs for receiving requests from citizens, but it did not leverage the data we collected, and kept us in a reactive position. Instead, we wanted a way to store this data and use it for additional insights so we could be proactive with the information we were collecting.

Within our app, we set up a “click here” portal to submit a request or report an issue where Santa Monicans could let us know about a need in the community. Rather than having the ticket routed directly to the appropriate city division, we set up a standalone call center to filter citizen requests, disseminate them to the appropriate division and, ultimately, create better synergy between divisions. This call center team has been incredibly vital to our operations as it has maximized the efficiencies in our process.

After the system was implemented in the spring of 2020, we realized our community had more needs than we had previously recognized. Before the switch, we averaged around 3,000 requests a year, and now we have had approximately 50,000 requests since implementing the change.

This rise in activity level also identified where issues kept springing up. Since we now had a way to filter through all the requests and make informed decisions with our proprietary information, we have achieved greater situational awareness of “problem areas” within Santa Monica. These problems are now communicated to our city managers and council members through bi-weekly reports. These reports ensure awareness of the recurring issues, enabling more rapid and targeted actions, and ultimately helping to decrease the rates at which they may be occurring, or helping to to stop them altogether.

In addition to the insights gained, the new mobile app has empowered our community and given them the tools they need at the tip of their fingers. The easy to navigate and flexable app has brought our community engagement into the 21st century and gives us the resources we need to continue to build out new functionality and adapt to the diverse and everchanging needs of our community. We have been able to quickly, and affordably curate a custom experience that will serve as the foundational cornerstone for our customer experience.

Creating a more efficient community
With the positive feedback from both our staff and citizens, we are currently exploring additional ways to find greater efficiencies in how we interact with our community. In a sense, we have opened the floodgates of inbound requests, but our call center has done an extraordinary job of rising to the challenge. Now, we are looking at ways to connect our call center and field service management teams. The aim is to enable the call center, in real-time, to alert service teams in the field about new issues in their current areas of focus, so we can become even more efficient and responsive in addressing and resolving requests.

The connections we have established in leveraging our Enterprise ServiceNow infrastructure has raised the bar of the Santa Monica experience. As a result, we understand what our community needs and curate our solutions based on how we can best serve the public and provide a world-class environment for our residents, tourists, and city employees.

Jeremy Peterson is an award-winning user experience designer, marketer and communicator with more than 15 years of experience. Holding a master’s degree from Harvard University, he’s taken a strategic approach to addressing some of the biggest challenges facing local governments today. Driven by the opportunity to serve his community, Peterson left corporate America and has spent the last 10 years in the public sector working to create a more engaging, accessible and digitally equitable experience. His work has been recognized by The Center for Digital Governance, The California Travel Association, and Digital Cities.