Building Chicago's
311 System

Nearly three million people call the City of Chicago home. In the City with one of the biggest non-emergency 311 systems nationwide, a constituency of this size equates to thousands of calls coming into Chicago’s 311 call center daily. So when the system was nearing its 20th year in operation, virtually unchanged since its launch in 1999, the City knew it was ready for an upgrade. In close collaboration with Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) and 311, Catalyst leveraged Salesforce’s Government Cloud to modernize the City’s 311 system by bringing it onto the cloud, increase interdepartmental collaboration, and improve the City’s communication with its residents.

Before updating to Salesforce, Chicago’s 311 consisted of a Motorola-based CRM, a public-facing service request intake form, and a mobile text-to-case feature that supported 13 service requests. Moving the 311 call center and the 33 City departments it supports over to the new system resulted in one of the largest 311 modernization projects in North America to-date. The new system consists of a cloud-based CRM, field service management, a digital knowledge base, an intuitive Community Portal, and the City’s first-ever citizen facing mobile application.

The City’s new 311 system improves existing functionality, but also adds a number of new features that City departments, 311 operators, and City residents can take advantage of. At the core of this system, though, is modern case management. While 70% of the calls 311 receives are informational, about 30% are infrastructure-related and require the attention of City departments.

Chicago’s new CHI311 utilizes Salesforce’s Service Cloud to create a case from multiple channels: 311 operators via the call center, City departments in the field, and residents using the new Community Portal and mobile app. From there, automated case routing sends the case to the appropriate department to be worked via guided flows for admins in the office and Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning for the department workers in the field. Digitizing the City’s work order management alone has saved the City time and money.

Much like the Community Portal, the City’s first-ever citizen facing mobile application takes the burden off 311 operators and provides an outlet for resident self-service. The CHI311 mobile application is integrated with the backend Salesforce CRM solution to allow residents to submit service requests, check the status of their request, and search for other requests in their neighborhood.

Additionally, the CHI311 mobile app provides users with personalized City information based on their location such as ward and alderman. Geospatial information through the “Near Me” functionality acts as a guide for locating important City locations such as the nearest CTA station, post office, police station, library, and more. This makes the CHI311 mobile app more than just a way to request and track services; it’s a way to get around. Chicago is a City of 2.8 million people, 77 community areas, 140 bus routes, 8 subway lines, 80 public libraries, and 69 post offices, all of which are encompassed in this one app.

With 33 distinct departments each encompassing additional bureaus and divisions, departmental collaboration and communication is of the highest importance to the City of Chicago. In the legacy system, departments were siloed and rarely worked together to resolve resident service requests. Even when a request would transfer from department to department, the legacy system did not fully support the transfer of information often necessary to properly carry out the work.

Prior to CHI311, there was no distinction between a service request and a work order. Our team worked with the Department of Innovation and Technology, 311, and City departments to separate service requests (cases) and work orders (departmental work). In the new system when a resident makes a request, both a service request and a work order are created. With this new approach, all department work is handled through work orders which all roll-up under the resident’s service request. This allows departments to carry-out their work but to create multiple work orders under the same service request and communicate easily across work orders. This provides residents with a full-view of the work required to complete their request and keeps them in a constant flow of communication with the City. Most importantly, our team consolidated the activities departments use to describe their work and updated the language to terms residents would understand.

The legacy system housed thousands of reports used by 311 and City departments. To ensure we did not remove functionality from departments on the new system, our team recreated essential City reports using Salesforce’s reporting capabilities within Service Cloud, but also through Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics. This allows users to access the same data points they had in the old system, but to also create and run their own reports using the additional data in the new system.

Since all data within Salesforce is reportable, our team further improved the department experience by creating unique dashboards that provide key performance metrics upon login that are customizable by department or individual user such as number of work orders completed/open, resource performance, cases by source, and more.