Mississaugas eCity Initiative | |
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The eCity Development TeamBell Canada and City of Mississauga staff members
worked together as one team throughout the
eCity development phase.
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Mississauga's eCity InitiativeReinventing customer service for the broadband era
Broadband changes everything!
In an era filled with opportunity thanks to the options that broadband delivers, we all now face the challenge of redefining who we are, what our jobs will be, and how we will do them.
Bell Canada and the City of Mississauga are two organizations who have come together to work on a joint project that will help each of them move forward, changing both themselves and the nature of their long standing business relationship.
For the City of Mississauga the goal has been to create a community web portal, which would demonstrate Mississauga's on going commitment to being a leader in customer service. It was the vision of former City Manager, Dave O'Brien that they would create a web portal that would absolutely minimize the need for citizens to attend city hall physically in order to do business with the city.
 Consistent with its culture of excellence the city sought out a vendor that could guide them through the process of designing and implementing the best possible software engine for its portal. This freed the city to focus on issues related to how the portal would interact with their stakeholders. Gary Williams, Public Affairs Consultant for the city explained, "We interviewed a lot of vendors and frankly we were surprised by the strength of Bell's proposal. Not only did they have the technical depth required for the project, but they understood on line customer service inside out. We shared the same client base and on-line vision. At the end of the day, what we wanted was a web portal that was not only technically excellent but one that delivered the best possible service to our customers."
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As the project unfolded the portal evolved into more than just a mechanism to help citizens avoid a trip to city hall.
- The automated authoring and content management system frees city staff to focus on the job of communicating with the public and to escape from the burden of traditional page layout and design. o Information destined for the city portal now goes through a review and approval processes before being posted.
- Material that is time sensitive can be made visible strictly between certain dates.
- The online nature of the portal means that citizens can have access to city services on a 24/7 basis;.
- Polls and user feedback forms provide content developers with a two-way dialog with their customers.
- eCommerce functions allow citizens to purchase
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Bell Canada- Standing left to right:
Doug McKenzie, Senior Director, Ontario Public
Sector; Huw Morgan, Senior Director, eBusiness;
Neeraj Seth, Business Development Manager;
Tammy Cail, General Manager, eBusiness Solutions.
Kneeling left to right: Dom Fera, Director,
Community Portals; Gary Cameron, Vice President,
Enterprise Accounts. City of Mississauga-
Standing right to left: Sven Tretrop, eCity Evangelist;
Jack Lawrence, Director Information Technology.
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an expanding number of products and services from their city.
Gary explained, "What we now have through our portal is a very effective two-way communications channel that our users can access 24/7. This allows our staff to participate in an on going dialog with our residents and businesses. We have had three times the number of page views since we launched and continues to see growth. The portal is now clearly one of the city's most effective vehicles for getting our messages out to the public."
For Bell Canada's point of view we spoke with Dominic Fera, Bell Canada's business development manager for the eCity initiative, "Taking on this project was part of our program for changing the way that Bell Canada sees its role in helping people communicate. Being a communications company we increasingly see our role as helping clients with their full range of communication infrastructure needs, including eCommerce and online customer service. Bell has had a long history of helping Federal and Provincial governments interact on line with their constituents.
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Adapting our skills to develop a municipal web portal is in fact a very natural progression. Working with the City of Mississauga has been an opportunity to collaborate with an excellent client, one with high standards and a commitment to create the best product possible. What we have learned from this project is already winning us new business with cities across Canada."
Gary went further to say that, "Working with Bell has been great, they were literally part of our team, they attended every meeting, and they were definitely part of our creative process. I don't believe the project would have moved forward without them. It's all been a great success for us."
Clearly this project has been a tremendous win-win experience for both participants. The City of Mississauga has developed a way to dramatically and cost effectively, improve customer service. Bell Canada has expanded its role and leveraged its expertise to help its client achieve its business objectives through enhanced on-line communications.
Even more important than the benefits that these two organizations have obtained from their collaboration, is the model for success that they have demonstrated. Restructuring around broadband business models will never be a solitary pursuit. Like Bell Canada and the City of Mississauga, service providers and customers in all sectors will eventually need to learn to communicate and to work together more closely, in order to find the best ways to deliver maximum value using broadband.
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