Winston-Salem, NC saves 55 hours in Development Services within first week of using Acta

Customers need a lot of handholding

In 2020, Winston-Salem (pop. 244,000) implemented a digital platform to do their permitting online. While contractors who frequently did business with the City were able to navigate the permitting process, homeowners doing work on their properties required a lot of hand-holding. 

Staff turnover and vacancies strained the Department

Winston-Salem’s Planning and Development Services Department was strained by staff turnover, resignations, and retirements, leaving limited staff in place to assist customers, do back-end data entry, review plans, do inspections, and issue Certificates of Occupancy. 

Frontline staff were spending up to 60% of their days on repetitive tasks like answering phone calls and emails, assisting customers with similar issues over and over. 

“It’s hard on staff to clean up permit applications, do back-end data entry, keep records, issue COs, and update processes while dealing with high volumes of customer inquiries. The phones ring and emails come in–it’s very frustrating for staff to have to answer the same questions over and over while trying to get through their workday. It doesn’t create the best environment for good constituent interactions, especially when we’re understaffed.” - Yolanda Price, Permitting Supervisor

Up and running in one day

The City of Winston-Salem evaluated Acta to cut the time their staff spend assisting customers over phone and email so that their team could do all they needed to do with limited staff. 

“Acta took 10 minutes for our IT Department to install. It’s the easiest tech implementation we’ve done to date. The Planning and Development Services staff were trained in 30 minutes, and were using the solution from day one. You can tell the solution was designed for local government staff.” - Tim Knowles, IT

Results

The benefits of Acta extended beyond helping Permit Technicians deliver a smooth customer service. The Planning and Development Services Department was able to maintain consistent customer service communications across constantly changing staff, train new employees on processes faster, and keep track of frequently recurring inquiries to update their website–all with our easy-to-implement solution. 

“With Acta, we have a central place to store all of the information we need to deploy to assist customers with their development needs. Now, our staff are less distracted and have more capacity to do all of their tasks without added stress. And, as management, I am confident that no matter who’s responding to a customer, the customer is getting all the information they need to submit a permit application smoothly.” says Yolanda.

Staff saved 55 hours across 5 team members within the first week of implementation. Acta nearly eliminated back and forth email chains with customers. And, customer satisfaction increased because customers received consistent, clear, and robust information. 

Conclusion

Winston-Salem was up and running with Acta in one day and within the first week was able to:

• Decrease their staff stress.
• Increase their department’s capacity to handle higher-level responsibilities.
• Increase your customers’ satisfaction by delivering better service.

Want to see how your department can reduce staff stress, increase capacity, and power better customer service?

Please visit actasolutions.io today to schedule a free consultation.