Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Mark Barham, Information Technology Director from City of Williamsburg, VA and Ryan Hunt, Managing Editor for City of Arlington, TX to dive into their approach to citizen engagement. Bratton Riley from Citibot, joins us as well and together we will learn about what made these governments pick Citbot to deliver more digital, citizen-friendly tools for one-click engagement on the go...and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor.
In this short series, we’re talking all about Citizen Engagement. I’ll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve.
Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available to help by efficiently providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We’d love it if you could spend less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. Stay tuned for more episodes on leading citizen engagement tools and the innovators in local government putting their products to use. Read the Guide.
More info:
Featured government: City of Williamsburg, VA
Government Guest: Mark Barham, Information Technology Director
Featured government: City of Arlington, TX
Government Guest: Ryan Hunt, Managing Editor
Featured Maker: Citibot
Maker Guest: Bratton Riley
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this short series, we're talking all about citizen engagement. I'll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve. Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available to help by effectively providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We'd love it if you could spend a little bit less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly.
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Mark Barham information technology director from Williamsburg, Virginia, and Ryan Hunt, Managing Editor for Arlington, Texas, to dive into their approach to citizen engagement. Bratton Riley from Citibot joins us as well and together we will learn what made these governments pick Citibot to deliver more digital citizen friendly tools for one-click engagement on the go and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor. Thank you all for joining me today. Can you quickly each introduce yourselves and share a bit about your roles?
Mark: (01:23)
So I'll start this is Mark Barham. I'm the Director of Information Technology for the City of Williamsburg, Virginia. In that role, I am responsible for all technology voice video data, uh, within the city of Williamsburg. The city is obviously a very well known location in the United States, very historical, home to William and Mary. So a very diverse set of demographics that we have to engage with here in Williamsburg.
Ryan: (01:53)
Yeah, I'm Ryan Hunt. I'm a Managing Editor for the city of Arlington's Office of Communication. That's Arlington, Texas. We do get some confusion with Arlington Virginia and some of the Arlingtons that are out there, but we're about 400,000 residents in between Dallas and Fort worth. And we too have an incredibly diverse population that we need to reach - a very high Vietnamese population, very strong Latino population. So I'm excited to talk about some of the tools we've been able to utilize to reach those residents.
Bratton: (02:21)
And I'm Bratton Riley. I am a co-founder and CEO of a company called Citibot. I'm here in Charleston, South Carolina, and excited to be with you all today.
Lindsay: (02:32)
Fantastic. Well, I want to begin with a little history on each of your cities, Mark and Ryan and what your approach has been to citizen engagement prior to working with Citibot. Mark, I'll start with you.
Mark: (02:44)
Sure. So I think our approach has always been to meet residents where they're at. The last thing I want to do is to dictate to residents how you communicate with your government. I want to make it easy for you to communicate with your government in the manner in which works best for you, the time in which it works best for you. Um, so kind of taking all of that and packaging it together in a manner of using best practices is how we really approach this idea of citizen engagement.
Lindsay: (03:14)
You talk about best practices and using tools available. This may be surprising for some, but a lot of our listeners don't know about a lot of the tools that are out there and what these best practices are. Can you go into a little bit more about specifically other than Citibot, we're going to get into Citibot, tools that you've been using, whether that's social media or email campaigns, or meet and greets pre COVID, that type of thing.
Mark: (03:40)
Sure. So we certainly have a fair, especially given the size of our locality. We're about 15,000 people, a half of that are Willian and Mary's students, uh, so heavily involved in social media, we use social media significantly, uh, to reach out to different, uh, residents, uh, to different demographic groups. We have in the past, we've significantly used a text-based messaging to, to reach out to people, to allow them to contact us, to report issues. Uh, we'll talk a lot more about that when we get to Citbot, uh, but then just email campaigns and, and utilizing GIS technologies in a way to really target specific either locations within the city or specific demographics, and then funnel that back through, uh, social media are some really, uh, unique ways that we've been able to interact and reach citizens.
Lindsay: (04:33)
Great. Thanks for that. That really helps. And Ryan, what has Arlington's approach been historically to citizen engagement?
Mark: (04:39)
Yeah, I think, um, you know, Bratton and Citibot kind of fit in well with what we were already doing. It was a perfect fit of just kind of that shotgun approach of really, we really try to get every single avenue that we possibly can to reach our residents. Social media is a big one. We've got about 120,000 combined followers on Facebook and Twitter. We do an e-news system where we kind of send out a weekly newsletter of some of our content. That's been pretty successful about 3000 subscribers there. And then, uh, we started a dream team kind of digital ambassador program to try and get some positive engagement and try to get some community spirit developed, uh, here in the city. To Mark's point, you want to try to get to where people are and not make them come to you. And so a Citibot just kind of fit right in nicely with, with finding them the easiest way for residents to be able to communicate or report issues and to give us compliments too. We'll take those as well.
Lindsay: (05:27)
Well, I'm really excited to have you both on the podcast, based off your unique roles, Mark, you bring the perspective of IT. And Ryan, you're more communications for your city. Arlington and Williamsburg are also very different in terms of population. You mentioned very diverse populations for each, but Arlington's population size, as you said, Ryan, over 400,000 people, whereas Williamsburg is right on 15,000. So it just goes to show the flexibility of Citibot as a product, and I'm looking forward to tapping into that more. Each of our cities has been engaged with Citibot for a little while now to improve citizen engagement. Williamsburg, you've been on board for about three years in Arlington, just over a year. Citizen engagement though is an extremely broad term. Can you share more about what specifically you're using them for and Mark, I'll start with you.
Mark: (06:16)
Okay. So we started like you said, about three years ago, I think we were the second ever client of Citibot and the unique part about Citibot was it allowed us to essentially get into the chat bot, um, game to allow residents to text, uh, back and forth with us. So that was successful. We did all kinds of campaigns to get residents, to take the number for Citibot to text in, and then, um, allow them to start interacting with us. For us the real game changer there was utilizing the Citibot once we enabled it on our website. That dramatically increased our usage of that, I think, in, in the first week or so, we shot up about 2000% in terms of utilization of that.
Mark: (07:06)
So really, really a game changer for us in the way that citizens can interact. We actually, uh, modified it somewhat to allow during the COVID pandemic to allow it so that individuals coming to city facilities could actually check in and they did like a text-based, check-in process to do that. So really, really adaptable. And, and it's really something that we, we come up with ideas for, uh, quite frequently as Bratton will attest to, uh, to say, Hey, can we add this type of functionality to it? So really, really, uh, really adaptable piece of software and something that we really use significantly.
Lindsay: (07:48)
Ryan, how about you all? How is Arlington using the product?
Bratton: (07:51)
Yeah, I think we started with the text, um, option, which was kind of the first implementation. Our push alerts, particularly during COVID-19, uh, has been a tool that we've utilized quite a bit. And so we're able to kind of push out video messaging and key alerts to our citizens. That is something that has been really cool for people who have signed up for that text number. It goes directly to them, which has been great. And we implemented the chat feature on our website. So it's got an icon, they were able to kind of Arlington brand it up and make it look really nice on the website. And so on mobile and desktop device, you can ask those questions and, and I really appreciate the flexibility and the adaptability of Bratton and kind of going with the pandemic and Citibot, making sure that we had COVID-19 centric messaging when that chat box pops up, because that's where a lot of our questions are coming from. And that's the topic that people are interested in the most.
Lindsay: (08:42)
Great. And Bratton, I'm going to pass it over to you, but before I have you talk a little bit more about how Citibot works, I want to make sure we frame it from, we have a wide range of listeners with different levels of experience with technology. As you know, you've talked with a lot of people in local government. I know that some of them are probably listening to this going, wait, I have to then respond to text messages from everybody in my community. So let's make sure we address that. And tell us a little bit more about how the product works.
Bratton: (09:09)
Well, thank you, Lindsay so much. And thanks gentlemen for speaking so highly of us, um, Citibot is a contactless citizen engagement and customer service platform. So what I mean by that is that a resident can engage with their local government through interactive communications in a contactless environment that's powered by our AI chatbot. And so what that means when, when we talk about text messaging, as you mentioned, is that a resident can text in a question like how do I get a business license, or what's the COVID-19 mask guidelines in this city or whatever it might be. And they're going to get an answer as well as they can make a service request. Like I need to report a pothole or my trash wasn't picked up, or I lost my dog, whatever it might be in our systems going to respond back to them.
Bratton: (10:06)
So we started and enabled residents to do that via text message. And as the gentleman said, we're launched our web chat solution as well. Uh, the point with the product, in addition to making communication simpler, we want to make it more accessible to all residents, regardless of their socioeconomic background. That's very important to us and, and is shared with both Mark and Ryan here, but we want to make sure it's a full resolution contactless environment. So that at any point in time in the communication that the residents having with their local government, they have an out to send a direct message and they can send whatever communication they need to send in. And they're going to get an immediate response that says, thank you so much for your message. A customer service representative is going to get back in touch with you.
Bratton: (10:59)
We talk about customer service escalation, and it's sometimes you just need to talk to somebody and it's important that we offer and it's important for these tools to be able to make sure that the customer, the resident in this case does not get to a dead end. We want to make sure they can communicate what they need to communicate so that they do not resort to other communication channels that Ryan and Mark and their teams are having to manage on a one-to-one basis. So we want to automate that as much as possible, and that's what we're doing.
Lindsay: (11:33)
I know each of your local governments is leveraging Citibot tools in a slightly different way. Ryan, your team is using the text alerts, for instance, what you refer to as push notifications. Can you explain what this tool is and why Arlington has chosen to use this tool as well?
Ryan: (11:48)
Yeah, It was a really easy process to implement just about everything that we've done with Citibot has actually been really easy. Um, and they're working with a lot of the technology side of things with our, you know, our IT group and our action center, our Arlington action center. So they're probably doing a lot more of the harder work than I am, which is just inputting a text message that goes out to residents. But, you know, it was really a simple 30 minute presentation and they went through some of the do's and don'ts as far as how to make it look the best. And, you know, I didn't want things to split into two text messages. I wanted it to look clean. So it was really as simple as giving me a login code and kind of a system to be able to work within and the parameters. And it's been a huge asset to us during COVID-19. We had a mask giveaway and, you know, to be able to send that out quickly, uh, with that type of information, we've been able to send out kind of PSA's, YouTube videos that have been, uh, really important during this time in the pandemic. But, um, yeah, it's just been a super flexible tool and we've, we really take it and run with it.
Lindsay: (12:46)
Yeah. Well with COVID a lot of local governments are struggling with how do you get this critical information out to residents? So the push notifications, I know it can be very effective, um, even outside of the public sector. Obviously there are a lot of vendor options when searching for different citizen engagement tools. That said there are fewer for chat bot tools, uh, is this technology is still relatively new. How did you each discover Citibot and why did you decide to go with them versus a competitor? Ryan, we'll start with you.
Ryan: (13:14)
Yeah. So, um, Bratton and actually connected with my boss, uh, Jay Warren, who's the director of communication and legislative affairs. Um, there isn't a single conference in the country that Bratton doesn't find a way to get to and be able to, to promote and advertise his product, which I think is actually a compliment. It sounds facetious, but, um, he's, he really has done a great job of being able to pitch a Citibot as an easy tool to be able to implement. And so I, I first saw him when he came into our conference room back when we were still meeting in person and not doing zoom meetings. And, um, I was hooked from the get go as far as being able to implement this product.
Ryan: (13:49)
And, you know, we're always just trying to find easier ways for residents to be able to resolve issues and problems within our community. And we're very transparent. I think our city manager does a good job of making sure that we're as transparent as we possibly can be. And this gave us an opportunity to make it easier and to make it more efficient as far as being able to resolve things like potholes or, you know, um, some of the code compliance issues. And so lessen the burden of our staff while also making it easier for our residents to report problems. It was a win-win for us. So, um, yeah, no Bratton's been been great and we've, we've developed a really positive relationship with him and his entire team.
Mark: (14:27)
So Bratton reached out to me via my LinkedIn profile, um, and said, Hey, we'd like to talk or whatever. And, and quite honestly, we were, we were in the market, we were looking for ways to improve communications and to, to allow for this multi-channel communication whereby residents could, you know, ask questions, they could submit, uh, you know, issues to be resolved, uh, look up information on their own. And then Bratton reached out to me. And, and normally I will say to any vendor out there, normally I do not take those calls. I am not a fan of those types of calls, but there's something about Bratton. And I, uh, I took the call and, and to Ryan's point hooked, uh, Bratton does a really good job of selling his product. And quite honestly, I believe, at least in my instance, the product sold itself, it is extremely easy to use.
It is extremely functional. It is extremely adaptable to any situation. As I said earlier, we've used it as a, as a building check-in process, uh, during COVID-19. So it is extremely adaptable, extremely scalable. So, uh, for us, uh, I would echo everything Ryan said, um, in terms of ease of use and, and just the ability of, and the, um, the willingness of Bratton and his team to work with us when I can pitch some crazy ideas to Bratton. And he's never told me, no, he may say, well, let's how about we look at it at a different way. We come up with something maybe a little bit different, but, uh, easy, fantastic product, very easy to use. And something that is, that is ingrained our communications culture now.
Lindsay: (16:07)
Well, I know this, this concept of the product is easy to use, but so many people gloss over the hurdle that it is onboarding for so many of these products. So I want to talk about the nitty gritty. How did you get the product in the end zone? How long did it take? So from the time you signed the contract to implementation, what did that experience look like for each of your cities? Uh, Mark, we'll stick with you first.
Mark: (16:31)
Okay. So I think from the time we, again, we were, I think probably more of a Guinea pig than Arlington was just because of where we fell within the cycle of, of implementation. Um, but still from the time of signing the contracts to getting the text messaging piece in place, I think it was around a week. Uh, it, it really was, was very quick. We had some calls to, to discuss, you know, goals of the products, goals of the product, and then, uh, how it's going to best fit in our environment. We set up some of the, uh, the answers and in kind of fine tuned everything. And then we were alive on the text messaging platform, like I said, within about a week.
Lindsay: (17:12)
Wow. And Ryan, how about for you guys?
Ryan: (17:15)
Ours was a little bit different just because we had a lot going on. We had a new website launch, and then we also had an app that was doing, uh, some of some similar functionality to it, but wasn't as, um, interactive and kind of in your face on the website to be able to make it easier for residents to find. So I think, I think May 2019 was when we actually got the agreement in place. Um, and then I think, I think January was when we were able to get everything launched and up and running. And, um, yeah, we haven't looked back since it's been, it's been a great tool and we fine tuned really nicely. And, and, um, you know, I think I want to go back to Mark's point a little bit too, on the working with the vendor process, because it really, there are some vendors who I will not name that I, I do not answer their calls anymore, and frankly have sent some stern emails about basically stop bothering me.
Ryan: (18:03)
Um, particularly when, you know, we're focusing so much on trying to save lives and help our community stay safe during COVID-19. Bratton, really, and his team have really taken the time to get to know us as people, uh, which I think has made the process of implementation so much more seamless because we both want to succeed, but we want to succeed for each other and for it to be a true partnership. And I think that's the thing that I really like about Citibot is that it feels like kind of a family atmosphere. And they're one of the first vendors that I've worked with that has really tried to make that a two-way street and make it work in a way that is good for our team. And, and, and I think it's applicable to each city. I think they're willing to adapt no matter what your environment is that you're working on.
Lindsay: (18:44)
Great. Well, Bratton I want to talk about the AI piece of like how these questions are getting answered automatically, um, through Citibot tools. Does the government have the ability to upload Q&A, are you connecting through some sort of, uh, an API with any databases that they have with information? Obviously Arlington's answers to a question are going to be a little different than Williamsburg. So how are you navigating that?
Bratton: (19:10)
We're on this continuum, Lindsay of AI into machine learning into natural language processing, which I know is a bunch of technological mumbo jumbo. As we look at these government agencies, these government organizations that are surrounded by a lot of information, and they're surrounded by a lot of information because they do so many amazing things for their residents. I'm biased towards local government as, as you know, because I've lived here with my father being the long serving mayor of Charleston, South Carolina for 40 years. And so I have this tremendous amount of love for local government and all the services they provide, but there's so much information that surrounds government. And so in terms of answering questions and making sure that you don't, um, answer them incorrectly, um, what we have initially done is when a resident asks a question, we pluck out the keywords of that question and run a targeted Google search to the city website, the County website, to bring the information back because generally speaking, the information is on the local government website, it local governments battle with their websites because they're challenged with the content management of all that information.
Bratton: (20:31)
And so what we're able to do is really help streamline the Q and A and search process to bring that content back in seconds. And then we asked the question, was this the information you're looking for? And if it isn't send us a direct message so we can make sure we answer your specific question for you. And so we were able to do, at this point is deliver good content back in the form of answering the question, but making sure there are no dead ends. We want to make sure the resident's voice is heard and they don't have to start over and their customer service experience. Now, as we move into the technology and we use a lot of AWS technology and our own internal, uh, creation of technology we're on this adventure and trying to answer the question is how do we take this big data and organize it using machine learning, to be able to answer direct questions, uh, both in terms of providing FAQ, like you mentioned, Lindsay, but also to train the system so that it continuously learns how to better answer questions. We're a free flowing AI powered solution where we're not trying to limit the resident on what they can communicate. Um, it frustrates me when I engage with a chat bot. So, well, you can only ask questions about these certain categories. We wanna, you know, put the ease in the hands of the residents to make sure they can communicate whatever it is they need to communicate.
Lindsay: (22:05)
Well, Bratton, Your product is, is easy to use. It's extremely adaptable. Onboarding is impossibly quick. It sounds like. And you're also a great guy, uh, with a lot of experience in local government. So this all sounds too good to be true if I'm a local government listening. And so I want to talk about pricing a little bit. I know based off the fact that we have two very different sized cities on the phone right now, um, pricing is flexible. Can you explain the pricing model and how this product fits in to the budget for the largest city to the smallest town?
Bratton: (22:41)
Sure. So, and to the point that Ryan made earlier about implementation, one of the things that we did with Arlington was integrate into the citizen requests management platforms, these CRM systems. And so we're a free agent system. We're not tied to any one backend software solution. We just want to play nice with all of them, uh, and, and be very respectful of a government's technology ecosystem before we come in, because we don't want to upset those, uh, scenarios because we want to move fast and we don't want the teams to have to train up on a new software system cause they don't with ours. So what we do is we'll charge an implementation price that'll be tied to, are we integrating into a CRM? We do a marketing campaign with our customers to have a successful promotional campaign around launching this new service, which is a lot of fun.
Bratton: (23:36)
And, uh, we encourage our customers to white label it. So we want them to brand it to their city name if they want to. And then we'll charge a monthly subscription, that's tied to text message chat and web chat. Um, and so those will be monthly subscription prices and it's tied to population. So we'll look at a population count of a local government or smallest customer is South Bay, Florida, which has about 5,000 residents and we're in Fort Worth, which has almost a million and about to launch in New Orleans. Um, but we'll charge we'll, we'll look at population count and really try to extrapolate how many communications are we expecting and turn that price around to our customers. So it's scalable to large cities, but we love working with our small government customers too, because they can afford it.
Lindsay: (24:26)
Yeah. Fantastic. Uh, I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about the analytics piece. Data is becoming even more important to local governments as they're looking to provide better citizen engagement and service delivery, moving forward. Uh, Ryan, your position in communications is a lot about content and helping identify ways that you could be communicating better with the community. Um, there's probably some really great analytics that are coming out of use of this chat bot. Hey, we're getting 20% of our questions are related to X and you need to focus on how do we make that portion of the website more intuitive or, or that process better. What analytical tools has Citibot given you all so that you can start looking at some of these citizen requests, more granularly?
Ryan: (25:11)
Yeah, I think given us quarterly reports kind of PDF style, that'll, we'll kind of dive into the numbers and we've been really happy with what we've been seeing. And, and frankly, uh, you know, I think we, we, you know, I didn't touch enough on what Brad talked about earlier about the onboarding process to make sure that they can kind of all get along with each other as far as our technology systems in place. I think when we did that, we did a really good job of identifying kind of 10 to 12 topics that we knew would be, would be kind of the most, um, utilized as far as asking questions from our residents. And it's been pretty in line with what we've expected as far as, you know, the code compliance issues, you know, and, and I'm hopeful, and this is anecdotal. It's not, it's not, um, you know, scientific, but, uh, you know, I do see less messages coming through on some of these topics that were just coming to me on Facebook, which I'm managing as part of about 10 or 11 other hats.
And then now they can just, we can push them over to city bot and they can ask that question and get it resolved that way. So I think that's been really helpful. Um, but COVID-19, you know, not to belabor the point, although it is what we've all lived through for the last, you know, nine, 10 months. And, you know, obviously there's, there's more to come, unfortunately, uh, hopefully the vaccine implementation gets to where we needed to get to. But, um, you know, from a COVID-19 standpoint really focused, I'd say 70 to 80% of our concentration is COVID-19 related messaging and communication and looking at the analytics and the data they are asking COVID-19 related questions on Citibot, which is helpful. Then I think that just allows us to give us another tool to be able to say, Hey, if you didn't get the answer here, you can go to our web chat feature, ask the question and you'll get, you'll get that answer.
Ryan: (26:50)
And it's fast and it's efficient. And like I said, I mean, I, I really have, we have tested it out with people from a really high skill set when it comes to technology and comfortability and people who have a really low skillset, It's just an easy product to use, no matter your comfortability with technology and that really helps us with the low socioeconomic sections and sectors of our community. And to bring that back to some areas, we are trying desperately to make sure that we give them every tool that they possibly can to be able to get their problems resolved. So, um, I was a long winded answer to say, uh, yes, uh, we have been getting quarterly reports from citibot that has given us some really good tools and it has tailored our messaging, uh, from a communication standpoint.
Mark: (27:34)
So for us, um, we get the same reports, uh, Bratton set us up initially with it, with a dashboard that I look at, uh, periodically specifically to understand just what people are searching for, uh, how many users are using the system and then the issues that they're reporting. So, you know, you can use a lot of that data that you know, that you look at it, and there's a lot of, of, of information contained within there, specifically on the searches, you know, what are people searching for and, and help to answer the question, why can't they find it?
Mark: (28:07)
Uh, so as I said earlier, we use that data to go back on the website and to, to kind of revamp and relocate or where these, this information is so that folks can get, um, better information and get their questions answered a lot quickly, as well, as on the issues, if, if we're seeing issues reported, you know, and especially in targeted neighborhoods where folks are having their trash there, their trash isn't getting picked up, uh, routinely, then all of a sudden, we've, you know, that's, that's an issue or a question for a contractor. What is going on in this neighborhood? You know, another example might be, we're having a lot of issues reported for water main breaks in a certain part of town and everything. Do we really need to start looking at that, uh, infrastructure there as something that, that may need to be replaced sooner rather than later, because obviously it's failing and we know it's failing because it's being reported, uh, as an issue through Citibot. So really good analytics in there. Uh, that'll give you a really broad, um, overview of what's going on and, and quite honestly what people are looking for and what they're asking.
Lindsay: (29:15)
Well, Mark, I love your answer because looking at the questions that people are asking can really give you some great insights into the performance across your organization. And so for city leaders listening that's a really important piece too these analytics that you can now have because you don't have people answering phone calls and doing everything via email, or like you mentioned, Ryan answering a Facebook question. Pulling all of that data together in, in any kind of meaningful form is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Being able to have all of that in one place it will be much easier to pinpoint where some of the outliers are so great point there, Mark. Bratton, I'm going to let you have the last word, uh, you've made it your mission to help streamline this process for local government. So what is some advice you'd share with a local government looking for citizen engagement solution, specifically a chat bot solution?
Bratton: (30:10)
The first thing that I would say to them is, um, go for it. A lot of the times we deal with governments that, you know, maybe don't collaborate across departments and you've got one department that's looking for something. What's nice about both Mark and Ryan. Um, either from the IT side or the communication side, they see the whole organization from the macro level. Mark is seeing it from a technology standpoint. He's very involved with the operations of his city beyond technology and Ryan and his team see it from, you know, all the communications and how do those communications connect to the departments. And so I think my advice to local governments is first of all, think about customer service holistically. Think about the path that the resident takes to engage with you and make that path smoother.
Bratton: (31:09)
And think about user experience. Like I said, governments for too long have said, well, we're the planning department, and this is the content we need. We're the public works department and this is the data we need. No, no, the question is I am the resident and what do I need and how can I get it as fast as possible so that I help the government organization work more efficiently. And as a resident, I'm happier and I want to trust my government more because I had a better experience. That's the way we need to look at it. And so with local governments and advice to them, I'd say, I'd say, go for it and learn. And like what we're just talking about, the data analytics, let the data help you improve your organization and improve your relationships here. One of the things that happened with Arlington before COVID hit in early March, we realized something that we had no idea was going to happen. And that was about twenty-five percent of the questions, Lindsay, were about pet adoption. And how cool is it that residents are using this product to connect those dots to adopt a pet. Little did we know we're about to go into quarantine and you saw those images during quarantine where the pets are like, when are these people are going to get out of the house, but, um, but the point was, and then it's, and then it's back to the city. It'd be like, how can we help you promote this to your residents because we're showcasing something that you're doing awesome. And, and so the beauty of the data too, and the beauty of, of my, you know, my advice to local governments to go for it is let us let the data help you tell better stories about the amazing things that you do every day, because I'll talk to local governments all the time, and they'll say, you know, Bratton, we just don't promote ourselves very well.
Bratton: (33:01)
Go for it, make that user experience better for the resident, get them what they need, get the data, improve your organization, and just have fun doing it. Because as you can tell with the relationship that we have with these two awesome people on this podcast, that we have a good time doing it. And we were all learning together, uh, as we go forward.
Lindsay: (33:26)
Well, it's so great. And Mark and Ryan congrats on making the cut. I mean, this is an interesting podcast and that there were a lot of cities that wanted to talk about Citibot. And so it's not every day you have that experience with the vendor. So we're really excited to have you all on the podcast today to share your important work with the wider community of local governments, um, especially those looking to engage more digitally with their communities. And it sounds like it's easy to do it doesn't cost too much and Bratton's a great guy don't forget. So, um, keep up the exciting work in each of your governments and best of luck to you Bratton on behalf of Citibot.
Bratton: (34:02)
Thank you so much. This has been great.
Mark: (34:05)
Thanks Lindsay.
Ryan: (34:05)
Thanks Lindsay.
Lindsay: (34:10)
The municipal chatbot just may be the way of the future for day-to-day citizen services, this seamless way of answering questions and directing residents to the information they need not only provides a better user experience, but can also be instrumental in providing analytics to identify pain points that need to be addressed internally. As we talked about today, the push notifications are also handy in times of crisis when you need to get information out quickly to your residents.
If you're looking for a quick way to automate some of the traditionally high touch functions of government and provide an on-demand tool, that's more self-service, I encourage you to connect with Citibot and find out how Bratton and his team can help you get there.
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.