Customer experience has been front of mind for local governments that leverage technology to build workflows that can make governments more efficient, and Florida’s Miami-Dade County has been redesigning processes with the customers in mind by advancing projects through difficult circumstances.
During the Designing Digital Government Experiences to Work for Everyone webinar on July 8, Adam Mullins, Strategic Initiatives Manager for Miami-Dade County, described how the local government used Qualtrics to help build workflows during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recent Surfside Condo collapse.
“Qualtrics is really good at asking questions, recording those responses and producing reports,” said Mullins. “And that’s what we initially went into Qualtrics wanting just to gather feedback on various things in Miami-Dade County. The citizen feedback is essential to [the] future. But as different things get thrown out, as pandemics jump up, as things happen – we saw a lot of strength in Qualtrics in the evolving role.”
Mullins said that Qualtrics has allowed Miami-Dade County to digitalize forms quickly, and to survey employees to see if they have what they need, such as the right technologies, to do their jobs. Both items became important functions over the course of the pandemic.
“With a pandemic we use Qualtrics to survey our employees to just see do they have what they need to do their job? Do they have the technology, hardware, do they have the software, the management support? How often are they contacting the help desk, and just the things that we didn’t even think that we needed to ask our employees because we were 100 percent on site, and then overnight we went to 100 percent work from home so just those things that pop up that help us,” said Mullins.
During the recent Surfside Condo building collapse tragedy, Mullins said the county was able to build up a digital form where people could mark themselves safe. The form asks who the person is, what condo unit they live in, how many residents there are in the unit, or if they’re submitting the form on behalf of someone else. The project has since helped find some individuals that weren’t in the condo building at the time of collapse.
Mullins said that the condo assistance project was rapidly pushed out as well. Within an hour of him receiving an early morning text message, the county began building out the survey and had it live for people to start putting information in.
“Honestly, the hardest part is actually writing the survey. And then, the hardest part is the approvals, so getting it through the layers of bureaucracy to get it back approved to go out,” said Mullins.
