Does Your Agency Inspire Trust with its Citizens? - e-PlanSoft

Steps you can take to earn and increase your citizens’ trust and satisfaction

Trust and satisfaction—these are some of the key measures of success for public agencies. Unfortunately, earning high marks in these areas from citizens can also rank high among challenges for agencies. Public agencies operate to serve their citizens with an ever-growing list of services. At the same time, resources continually decrease and grow more difficult to attain. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it can be especially challenging to serve citizens well, instill confidence, and elicit a high level of citizen satisfaction. As a means of improving productivity in the face of diminishing resources, many agencies have transitioned to and rely on digital services as much as possible to accomplish their goals and tasks to best serve their citizens.

Sounds great, but unfortunately not all digital tools and services live up to expectations.  That can, and frequently does translate to reduced citizen satisfaction and trust with their governments and leaders.

But take heart. It’s not a lost battle, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that citizens will have such low trust and contentment in their governments. In an analysis of a recent survey conducted by Deloitte, R. J. Krawiec, a principal for Deloitte’s Government and Public Services Practice, states, “In general, respondents rate state and local agencies high on trust if they think that state governments’ digital services are easy to use, that governments’ web-based services help them accomplish what they need, and that state government safeguards their data well.”  The American City and County Magazine article goes on to state that, “Among the communities that fared the best, those governments known by the communities they served and those with user-friendly digital services ranked high.” Data security also showed as an area that affected the opinions of citizens.

How well do your citizens trust your agency and jurisdiction?

Plan reviews are among the services that can move the needle for the better – or worse – in your citizens’ opinion. Inefficient solutions create inefficient processes, and do not instill confidence in applicants. By contrast, cloud-based plan review, intake, and document management solutions facilitate faster, more efficient service, transparency and accountability, and reliably ironclad security that is perpetually monitored and up to date. Extending the effect on citizens’ opinions, cloud-based solutions are also operating under one of a few cloud-hosting options, and will typically include security standards that are perpetually monitored to ensure data is secure and backed up.

e-PlanSoft™ takes this responsibility seriously and lives up to it every day. While our solutions improve productivity and efficiency, they also instill trust and improve satisfaction among the citizens and applicants of our clients.

Starting with intake, the applicants’ experience is positive and user-friendly. It saves the applicant time and money by not requiring cumbersome paper plans to be printed or brought physically to the department office. A simple upload from the applicant’s office or anywhere else can be done in a matter of moments, and all electronically, with no printing, lifting, or transport required. It saves thousands of dollars in printing and days in transit over the course of the project. And with the use of the PDF Scout™ file inspection tool, once the plans are accepted, the applicant is ensured that they’ve been routed to the appropriate reviewer or department and are ready to move through the process.

Further enhancing applicant satisfaction, plan reviews performed with e-PlanREVIEW^® progress faster, with a shorter time to approval, and communications are improved all along the way. Applicants have the comfort of knowing that they can access project status on demand through the goPost™ Public Portal, and any communications are easily transmitted back and forth to keep the project progressing at an optimal pace.  In fact, we commonly hear reports from our customers that since adopting e-PlanREVIEW, their citizen satisfaction has improved.

All of our cloud-based solutions operate securely in our AWS environment. AWS is the top-ranked cloud-hosting environment and operates with ironclad security measures to protect data for agencies and applicants alike.

Securing your citizens’ trust and satisfaction is a goal that is attainable, and e-PlanSoft can help. To learn more, visit us at www.eplansoft.com.