City & County of Denver Civic Engagement in 2023, expanded Digital Experience

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

Laura Dunwoody, Director, Resident Engagement, 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’s been a very long time since I called a customer service center. I receive proactive updates with the entities I have relationships with, 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 311 Contact Center does that very well, and it’s 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 city services.

The City & County of Denver’s Digital Experience Team 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” and ads in newspapers.

We began this journey in 2020 with a move of our website to a new platform designed specifically with local government, 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 don’t 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% of all visitors to those pages initiated a Chat. It’s a channel more popular than we would be able to handle with just live agents in our 311 Contact Center, given the 20k+ web visits per business day. We’ve made the decision to adopt a Chat Bot that will co-browse our website for answer content. In 2023 we are looking to incorporate a Chat Bot release and expand our Chat offering.

“Our mission is to engage with and educate the people who work, live and play in The City and County of Denver”

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 number of followers and resident engagement have been established. In 2023 we will take a very strategic approach to what channels publish which content, while making decisions on future content as we follow the resulting engagement data.

Videos, videos, videos! Want to know how to order a new trash bin online? We have a video for that. Request a permit for a bathroom re-do? Renew your driver’s license? Adopt a pet? Pay your property taxes? We have found that “How to” videos available on YouTube and linked to the website pages where self-service options exist is a very effective way to increase the use of those self-service tools.

Every Tuesday “The Denver Local” virtual newsletter goes out to thousands of Denver residents featuring information about upcoming events, important announcements, and when appropriate, safety information.

Meeting our residents on the channels they already use, with information, stories about their city, and ways to maximize all there is to do here is an ever-expanding opportunity. The Denver Digital Experience Team is just getting started! Our mission is to engage with and educate the people who work, live and play in The City and County of Denver. Digital Transformation is taking flight in Denver in 2023!