City and County of Denver Civic Engagement in 2023

Laura Dunwoody, Director, Resident Engagement at City and County of Denver

Laura Dunwoody, Director, Resident Engagement at City and County of Denver

As the definition of “great customer service” in the corporate world has changed in the last decade, so have resident expectations for how their city engages with them.

Looking at my own life, it has been a very long time since I called a customer service center. I receive proactive updates from the entities I have relationships and I frequently use Chat. The chat bots have gotten very sophisticated, and I can quickly move to a live chat if my issue is beyond the basics.

Great customer service used to mean the calls were answered quickly and the experience with the live agent was positive. Denver does that very well, and it is not enough anymore! The current expectation is that we anticipate needs and address them, proactively. That we offer self-service options for the services we provide as well as opportunities to easily educate yourself on how to navigate your city services.

The City and County of Denver is taking on this challenge by moving our communications into more digital spaces, more proactive messaging leveraging state-of-the-art technology, and “mobile first” web design. Gone are the days of handing out “flyers.”

We began this journey in 2020 with a move of our website to a new platform designed specifically for local government, with mobile-first needs as a priority. Our web content has been WCAG2 Accessibility compliant since that move. Recent Colorado-specific legislation has Denver moving to WCAG2.2 over the next 2 years. We are partnering with Accessibility Assessment software to find our areas of opportunity. Redesigning policies and training for our 150 Web Authors will insure we do not add any non-compliant content as we move toward the July 2024 deadline for Colorado HB12-1011.

In 2021 we added Live Agent Chat to our 311 Contact Center. Chat is accessible from specific pages on Denvergov.org. It was a pilot that quickly showed how popular that channel can be if we opened it up to every page on the website. 15 percent of all visitors to those pages initiated a Chat. It is a channel more popular than we would be able to handle with just live agents in our 311 Contact Center, given the 20k plus web visits per business day. We have made the decision to adopt a Chat Bot that will co-browse our website for answer content. In 2023 we will incorporate a Chat Bot release and expand our Chat offering.

Social Media i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. have been used by the City of Denver for a few years now. 2022 was the year for building out a formal structure of how we use social media and what we want to accomplish with it. Metrics with supporting dashboards have been developed. Goals for the number of followers and resident engagement have been established. In 2023 we will take a very strategic