5
min read

Mill Valley, CA finds staff bliss by using Acta

How the City of Mill Valley's Building Dept unifies previously scattered communications via phone, email, and permit portal.

The digitization of the permitting process has forced frontline staff in Development Services Departments to communicate with customers over multiple channels--over lengthy email chains, draining phone calls, and permit portal messages that don't quite make it to the customer. Increasing communications over many channels means that front counters have to be that much more thorough and consistent in each and every communication channel the customer uses to get information from the department.

The City of Mill Valley, CA found that their staff was spread thin, providing information, instructions, and technical assistance over the phone before a customer submits an application, and then via email and their permitting system during the submission and resubmission process. The department needed a way to deploy consistent submittal checklists, links, documents and application review comments that everyone in the department could share and easily access when and where the customer most needs it.

That's why the City of Mill Valley's Building Services Department uses two of Acta's solutions to power easy and consistent communications over phone calls, emails, and in their permitting portal. They use Acta's Knowledge Center to store their department's customer service workflows, customer-facing process checklists, resources to navigate their online permitting platform, application review workflows, and forms/applications that powers their development review process. And, their Acta Knowledge Center integrates into their Outlook inbox and into their permit portal (Trakit) so that frontline staff can easily access and deploy consistent communications across all of their channels faster than previous manual methods.

By unifying their previously scattered communications using the centralized Acta Knowledge Center, Mill Valley's team of 4 frontline technicians deployed 450 pieces of consistent information across three channels, saved 150 hours, and saved $5,271 in 1 month.

Get in touch to see how your department can unify communications across phone calls, email conversations, and in your permit portal to yield time savings, cost savings, and faster development review timelines.

Pavani Peri

Co-Founder & COO

Pavani has worked for local government in economic development. In addition to Acta Solutions, she also works with an affordable housing agency.