City officials this week announced the launch of a new mobile app called Palm Coast Connect, which is designed to streamline the process through which citizens access public services.
Residents can use the app to report a pothole or code violation, upload photos, notify city crews of broken streetlights and follow the action city workers are doing to fix the problem, all in real time.
Palm Coast Mayor Milissa Holland compared the new portal's tracking feature to the "Amazon of ordering" during the City Council's June 4 meeting.
"You always know where your Amazon package is, one way or another, because it's tracked," Holland said. "Our residents will be able to know where their case is. Is it being resolved? How many days has it been resolved?"
City officials contend the technology will allow residents to access city services online much easier. It is based on customer relationship management, or CRM, software created by cloud-based firm Salesforce, which has headquarters in San Francisco.
Doug Atkins, a lead member of Palm Coast's information technology team, said customer service reps at City Hall field about 10,400 calls per day from residents.
The platform will make it easier for customer service to sift through different operating systems to quickly find information for residents. It will also allow city officials to use "real-time dashboard analytics" to track citizen's requests and try to identify trends as they are emerging.
"It's going to be telling us where we need to be deploying people," City Manager Matt Morton said. "We're going to understand that in real time instead of waiting until after the fact when an issue comes up."
Councilman Nick Klufas seemed to grasp the importance of the data and analytics, telling fellow council members that figures gathered from the app's tracking will likely inform many of the board's policy decisions in the future.
"Having these dashboards and the analytics are really going to allow us to be able to enrich the insight that, as council members, we use to make the decisions about the direction of the city," he said
The platform, which will allow citizens to communicate more directly with city service workers, is touted as providing access to the city's services 24 hours a day. It is available for free on GooglePlay and the Apple store, city officials said.
Residents can also access the platform online at palmcoastconnect.com.
Holland alluded to Palm Coast Connect during her April 5 State of the City address, calling it an "interactive citizen engagement" model that resulted from a partnership between the city and Coastal Cloud. Holland has worked full-time as director of business development at the Palm Coast-based software company since June 2017.
During Tuesday's council meeting, Cynthia Schweers, the city's customer service manager, performed a step-by-step walk-through on the platform. She provided a brief tutorial showing residents how they can use the app to request a pot hole be filled or ask for trash picked up.
"This is designed to be the citizen's connection into City Hall — their friend at City Hall," Schweer said. "We want it to really transform the way we as a city interact and communicate with our residents."
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