Back to Basics: City Services and 311 Service Requests

• Author: Genie N.L. Stowers
• DOI: 10.1177/0160323X211064253
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Research Articles

Back to Basics: City Services

and 311 Service Requests

Genie N.L. Stowers

Abstract

With data from service delivery requests in twenty-nine cities, this article reports on a comparative

analysis of city service request systems (311 systems) and their operations. The study uses actual

311 service request data available through cities’open data portals. A typology of thir ty service

type categories was created. Various hypotheses were tested. As city population increases, the num-

ber of service requests also increases. Garbage/recycling is the most commonly requested service,

followed by code enforcement requests, parking, pickup of bulk items, and abandoned vehicles.

Cities are no longer just using telephones for their users to submit requests but have also now

incorporated other service channels. Service resolution times vary across cities and service cate-

gory but there is some evidence that safety and health types of services receive priority and are

resolved more quickly. The article ends with managerial and policy implications.

Keywords

urban administration, service delivery, 311, city management

Public administration doesn’t get any more fun-

damental than the delivery of services to users

upon their request. Users contacting 311

systems to report that a service is needed

among the most basic coproduction of govern-

ment services is crowdsourcing community

needs. Following one typology of coproduction

(Nabitchi, Sancino, and Sicilia 2017), 311

service request systems represent the

co-delivery of services at an individual level.

With data from service delivery requests in

twenty-nine cities, this article reports a compar-

ative analysis of city service request systems

(311 systems). The 311 service request centers

have become an essential part of many cities’

service tool portfolios, growing in number and

importance across the country. A Virginia

Beach study investigated consolidation of

their multiple call centers; they determined

that 84 percent of their departments had specific

employees answering user requests (and in 23.7

percent of the departments, those employees

spent up to 91 or more percent of their time

on those tasks). Further, 72 percent received

twenty-six or more requests for service during

just one week. By consolidating requests for

services into one 311 call center, cities eliminate

the need for users to struggle to answer ques-

tions like, which government do I ask to do

this, what department do I go to, and what

School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement,

San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Genie N.L. Stowers, School of Public Affairs and Civic

Engagement, San Francisco State University, Downtown

Campus, 835 Market Street, Suite 679, San Francisco,

CA 94103, USA.

Email: gstowers@sfsu.edu

Research Article

State and Local Government Review

2022, Vol. 54(1) 13-31

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0160323X211064253

journals.sagepub.com/home/slg

is their phone number? (Virginia Beach

Department of Management Services 2011).

Once based entirely upon telephone requests,

these systems have expanded to include multiple

means of collecting requests, organizing and

identifying them in “call”centers, and forward-

ing them to the appropriate city agency for

action. This referral system has become a

welcome shift for cities and users, as they

replace users trying, on their own, to navigate

sometimes unclear websites or phone directories

to try to figure out whereto direct their problems.

Cities’open data portals now allow us the oppor-

tunity to directly study these systems with the

data generated by the 311 systems themselves.

The article will provide a literature review on

the research to date using 311 systems, identify

a typology of the most commonly requested

311 services, and test hypotheses about these

systems across major American cities. The

methods and data, 311 call/click requests

obtained from open data portals of various

American cities with 311 systems, will be

described, and conclusions are drawn.

Government Service Delivery

and Service Requests

Public sector services are delivered to users via

a limited number of channels or modes:

face-to-face, telephone, postal mail service,

e-delivery through the Internet (web or email)

and, through m-government or mobile

devices. Services can also be characterized by

their complexity level: uncomplicated, limited

complexity, and highly complicated.

311 Service Request Systems

The idea behind 311 systems was to apply tech-

nology to users’need to request services to

increase responsiveness and accountability

and, ultimately, trust in government. These

systems create more transparency in service

delivery, provide more customer-oriented ser-

vices, and positively focus on citizen engage-

ment. The first 311 systems were developed

during the Clinton Administration as

community policing strategies to relieve pres-

sure in cities where users called 911 lines with

nonemergency and emergency requests. In

1996, the Federal Communication

Commission (FCC) set aside the 311 number

for nonemergency uses. (U.S. Department of

Justice Office of Justice Programs 2005).

After much planning, Baltimore developed

the first 311 system and processed the first

311 service request on February 13, 2001

(City of Baltimore 2019). The opening of the

nonemergency service request system had an

immediate impact upon their 911 system: the

number of calls to the 911 number declined,

the amount of time it took operators to answer

calls went down, and the number of users

hanging out without speaking to an operator

declined (Schwester, Carrizales, and Holzer

2009). In Baltimore, the system was also inte-

grated into their CitiStats system and, ulti-

mately, strengthened that, too. Other cities

soon followed, and by 2009, at least thirty-two

cities had the system (Schwester, Carrizales,

and Holzer 2009). By the time of this study in

2017, at least eighty-four cities had adopted

311 systems.

Today’s 311 systems are sophisticated

systems with multiple input channels (including

mobile options and incorporating Web 2.0 inter-

activity) for receiving resident requests, back-

end CRMs (Citizen Relationship Management)

databases, integrated delivery systems transfer-

ring requests to all departments of a government,

and feedbacksystems allowing citizens to follow

their requests to resolution. “There’s beena shift

away from 311being a glorified switchboardthat

handles basic questions to where it can handle

multiple channels, moving requests, forward

automatically, even closing out the process and

informing the customer that the job is done. …

311 is now about work order management,

field services and customer satisfaction.”

(Newcombe 2017).

Further, “the idea is that people should not

need to know what agency is responsible for

fixing problems.”(Minkoff 2016, 216).

Today, channels used in U.S. cities’311

systems include everything from the traditional

telephone, mobile apps, Web interface, Twitter,

14 State and Local Government Review 54(1)