United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

Muscat Municipality (MM) is the provider of essential services to about 776k citizens and residents of Muscat Governorate which is also the capital of the Sultanate Oman. These citizens and residents constitute the entire customers to the Municipality and they are spread over 6 districts (wilayats) and cover a total of 3,900 square km. The services render by the Municipality includes construction permit, rent contract, municipality license, building permits, parking permission and violations and the other municipal services. With huge customer-base distributed over a vast area, provision of quality services to the community remains a constant challenge to the organisation.
In the previous manual system of obtaining customers’ feedback, it was tedious to keep track of the complaints and the follow-up. The customers had to personally visit the Municipality offices to verify the status of their complaints and outstanding issues. MM also could not ascertain the efficiency of the internal processes in solving the issues or feedback raised.
Furthermore, some serious issues affecting health and safety could not be effectively followed through as there was no means of tracking or monitoring its effect. The concerned departments may be able to take immediate actions to rectify the situations if they were not aware of the problems on the ground. In addition, these feedback cannot be effectively used to enhance or improve municipal services as there was no system to log, document and follow-up the information. For a customer-centric organisation such as MM, customers’ satisfaction and feedback are essential measurement of the effectiveness and efficiency of their services. It mirrored the quality of work done by the organisation. Hence, it is essential that an organised means of collecting such information should be adopted by MM.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
Being a customer-centric organisation, the municipality vision is to “Attain the highest degree of excellence in providing services while preserving the cultural identity of the city.” The MM Contact Center embodies the essence of this vision. The Center facilitates the flow of services' information from customers to MM through various channels. Through direct communication with the customer, the Center becomes the conduit in which MM can monitor public comments at the same time evaluating the organisation's performance. The whole concept of the MM Contact Center is focused on gathering feedback and compliants from customers to achieve higher service quality. Business process for the Contact Center comprised the following support structures; 1st Line – Contact Center agents 2nd Line – Monitor and follow-up, sometimes solve the issues and close the case 3rd Line – Operational team, implement the solution When the state-of-the art Contact Center IT-based infrastructure was put in place, customers can give their comments, feedbacks and complaints through several channels; • Through 1 phone number 1111, a customer can access via the IVR system to provide information and feedback on certain issues and lodged a complaint. They can speak directly to a qualified and trained agent. Also with the voice mail, they can leave their comments if all lines are busy. All calls to the Contact Center are free of charge. • Tapping on the iMuscat application on smartphone platform, customers can send feedback and complaint and also provide GPS data to pinpoint the location of the complaint and upload relevant pictures. This is available in Apple iPhone Operating System (iOS), Google Android and Black Berry Operating System smartphone. • For customers who prefer using internet, they can also send their feedback and complain via emails at contactus@mm.gov.om or via online form Complain and Suggestion: • Feedback and complains can be sent also via the Fax to: 1111 that will be integrated directly to the Contact Center email: contactus@mm.gov.om • Complaints received via Twitter and Facebook are transferred and registered through the Contact Center. • Web chat: will be soon live. The Centre application also categorises all the feedback and complaints into different subjects and routed to the appropriate personnel to handle the case. The integrated workflow with the 2nd level processes in the backend expedites the follow up on the feedback and complaints. A tracking system is also embedded to monitor the improvement of the municipality services. In addition, the 3rd line, follow-up team can now update via SMS as they are on site, update the status of each case via SMS. Furthermore, an independent Quality Assurance team was appointed to carry out random checks on the customer services and obtain customers’ feedback. A report on customer satisfaction is provided regularly to improve the Contact Center and Municipality services. Through an integrated feedback system, customers are now assured that their feedback are tracked and follow-through by the relevant departments in MM.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The initiative was proposed by the Muscat Municipality through its effort in adopting Information Technology to streamline its operations and processes especially in its provision of services to the companies, other ministries organizations and the citizens. For the Contact Center, His Excellency (HE), the Chairman of MM took a personal interest in it. Customers’ feedback is the conduit for improvement of municipal services provided by MM. There is a summary of feedback for each Directorate and live feedback to Chairman’s office which indicates the commitment of the Chairman and Executive Management to improve the customer services. As more and more of these services are rolled out, there is also a need to ensure that the customers are supported when they encountered problems. In addition, it is MM’s aim to provide ease of use and convenience for the customers using these services. One of the key factors would be for the customers to be able to access all MM available services and relevant information from 1 single source. Hence, the MM Contact Center is very crucial support structure in the implementation of MM’s strategic vision. The concept of the Contact Center is also highly compatible to external environment as over and above serving just MM in its services and offerings; the aim of the MM Contact Center is to become the Contact Center of Muscat. Different target customers like tourists, citizens, expatriates will be able to get information and services via a single source. These would greatly enhance the image of Oman as the preferred tourist destination in the Middle East. At the application level, the Contact Center application is integrated with: 1. CRM application of MM 2. SMS gateway of MM 3. Active Directory of MM 4. iMuscat Smartphone application of the vendors. Through such integration, MM spearhead the way for Integrated Government (iGovernment) in the Oman and the region. Therefore all the stakeholders, Executive Management, internal and external end-users and vendors are all involved in the design and implementation of the initiative.

Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
a. What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
The vision of the quality Muscat Municipality is to provide effective and efficient services to the customers. To achieve this objective, Executive Management took the lead in preparing the overall strategy and provides the guideline based on the vision of transforming Oman into a knowledge-based society. Through the provision of numerous municipal services it is important that MM continues to obtain feedback and heed the issues from the complaints received, The aim of the Contact Center is to assist the organization and to increase overall productivity in service delivery, by achieving the following objectives: • Improving Customers' access and choice of communication channels while lowering the cost of service. • Providing consistent responses and improved quality of information for higher customer satisfaction. • Transparent follow-up procedure for all complains via problem/issues management system. • Allowing early identification of customer service trouble spots and problem issues by analyzing the incoming calls to the Contact Center. • improving the MM management for policies and regulation formulation by analyzing the collected data. The main strategy is to create a centralised contact center in which all feedback and complaints from various channels are logged, documented, followed-up and acted upon. Since its implementation in Nov 2010, about 24k feedback/complaints were received and a total of 22k of which were resolved. This indicated that about 94% of the feedback and complaints are acted upon and resolved, bringing about improvement to the municipality services and better customers’ satisfaction. The average time taken to resolve the complaints varies from 1 working day to 10 working days depending on the nature of complaints and feedback. Through the use of technology, customer usually gets an immediate reply on their application status. In fact, for some services like building permits, they do not even need to enquire for it. They will automatically be notified whether their applications are approved or rejected. For feedback and complaints, the customer will also be notified of the outcome of the case.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
2008 – Business Process Re-engineering was conducted and implemented. Understanding that technology is only an enabler, the business process and workflow were the first area that MM looked into. There was a lot of inefficiency in the old process and workflow. Streamlining them and removal of unnecessary steps will lead to increase productivity. Bearing in mind that the initiative will be put in an online environment, these new sets of Business Process and Workflow will develop to cater for that. They were also tested in an off-line environment to ensure that it was practical in the actual environment and not just on paper. 2009 – Implementation of the Contact Center. The solution for the Contact Center was developed and implemented. The Contact Center is available 24/7. Contact Center website and services are available in Arabic and English. System backup process is established and documented based on pervasive technical infrastructure requirements. System virtualisation through Virtual Machine ware. Service Availability incidents are reported, escalated and resolved based on an incident management policy. This is managed and monitored regularly to ensure that the services are available 24 hours 7 days a week.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
• Initially the tracking system only tracked activities done at the 1st and 2nd lines. The follow-up team in the 3rd line had to manually update their tasks into the system once completed. This caused undue delays to the clients; hence the tracking system was updated to include the 3rd line follow-up team. Now the 3rd Line team who are on site can update the status of each case via SMS. Such actions are updated instantly onto the system. • There was a lot of inefficiency in the old process and workflow. Streamlining them and removal of unnecessary steps led to increase productivity. The business process re-engineering steps eliminated inefficiency and geared the system towards an online G2C web environment. • Since the introduction of the contact center, MM had received numerous calls in which customers required on how to apply for municipal services currently available only at MM office. Due to overwhelming requests and after careful study of the internal processes, a new service “Tawasol” means “keep continuous” was added to the MM Portal in which the customers can apply for such municipal services online, hence eliminating the need to visit MM offices.

d. What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
1) Financial cost of the system MM invested initially about OMR 160k (USD 420k) with an annual maintenance of OMR 65k (USD 169k) and annual Oracle license renewal of OMR 19k (USD 50k). 2) Technical Architecture The Contact Center is developed entirely on web-based technology. The content management refers to case management system which manages the complaints from the time it was registered and solved. The case management system provides vital data for knowledge management base for future development and improving. This information is accessible through the intranet system in Muscat Municipality. Sharepoint is also used as the common management point, which stores the processes and procedures of the municipal services. This information is made available to the Contact Center Agents who have access on the updated processes and procedures for the related services. MM has put in extra consideration when deciding on the size of the hardware and software licenses for the Contact Center. In anticipation of growth, currently the Contact Center has a manning of 14 agents. However, the system is scalable to more than 400 agents. Presently, the E1 line can handle 30 calls concurrently which is double the number of agents. When the need arises, more E1 line can be added to beef up the capacity. 3) Human Resource cost Internal Team – 2 Database Administrators, 3 Developers, 2 resources for eServices and a team of 5 personnel for the Helpdesk services which provide technical support for all MM IT services Outsourced team – Functional Consultant, Technical consultant, Java Developer and Database Administrator

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
Corporate Sustainability Through the Contact Center, information is disseminated to the various departments integrated via Muscat Municipality knowledge-based CRM system. The processes in integrating the feedback to operational services are the key in providing quality municipal services. Due to the shared nature of the system, all departments in Muscat Municipality would be able to retrieve relevant data and share knowledge and information. Through such integrated services, users’ interactions and experiences can be improved tremendously. Such processes are also sustainable and transferable to other municipalities and councils in Oman as long as they have the same municipal services. This strategy achieved corporate sustainability by developing the skills and competencies essential to ensure project sustainability. Political Sustainability Political sustainability cannot be achieved without participation from various stakeholders. Therefore, in the initial stage of project, many meetings were held with various stakeholders to achieve political sustainability and secured their buy-in. The Chairman personally reviewed the process worklflow to ensure its effectiveness and sustainability. The participation of all stakeholders enable MM to build a unify solution with a clear business process and workflow for all services in an integrated manner which enables the project to be politically sustainable for the future. Economic Sustainability A clear economic benefit is derived from this project as since its launch in November 2010 until September 2012, the Contact Center received about 24k feedback/complaints and a total of 22k of which were resolved. This indicated that about 94% of the feedback and complaints are acted upon and resolved, bringing about improvement to the municipality servicers and better customers’ satisfaction. Thus increasing customers ‘satisfaction and also improved municipal services in Muscat Governorate, making it economically sustainable. Usability and revision Sustainability The successful implementation of the Contact Center in Muscat Municipality provides an impetus to other government organizations with customer-centric to install the same concept. Tender Board, Ministry of Manpower, Dhofar Municipality, Manzoon Electricity and Ministry of Health had visited and expressed interest to adopt MM Contact Center model. Ecological Sustainability The successful usage and deployment of the Contact Center empowers the MM staff to provide quality services to the customers. Through the Contact Center, information is disseminated to the various departments integrated via Muscat Municipality knowledge-based CRM system. The processes in integrating the feedback to operational services are the key in providing quality municipal services. Due to the shared nature of the system, all departments in Muscat Municipality would be able to retrieve relevant data and share knowledge and information. Through such integrated services, users’ interactions and experiences can be improved tremendously. Such processes are also sustainable and transferable to other municipalities and councils in Oman as long as they have the same municipal services.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The Contact Center is a conduit to track service efficiency of the Municipality. In fact, MM adheres to the customer-centric philosophy which is embedded into its evaluation plan. The direct impacts are; a. Faster and more effective Municipality Services- By being able to resolve 94% of the feedback and complaints immediately, the Contact Center has brought about improvement to the municipality servicers and better customers’ satisfaction. The Contact Center system is also integrated to the rest of the systems in MM. The integrated system embodied the knowledge management principles critical to the sustenance of MM electronic services such as using accessible knowledge from outside sources such as stakeholders, customers, clients, etc, for example through the use of web-based portal, users experiences and comments can be recorded and retrieved to improve the system further. This includes embedding and string knowledge in business processes, products and services so that MM staff are able to review history and information expeditiously and accurately. Transferring and sharing knowledge throughout the organization; with shared databases and information system, sharing of knowledge is seamlessly done to save precious time for the users and shortened the application time. b. Better Customers’ Satisfaction – through several channels of communication, they can now provide feedbacks and track such feedback to improve the Municipal services. This is evident in the Customer Satisfaction in June 2012 which indicated that there is 96.2%., high Level of customer satisfaction level related to contact center services. c. Wealth of data - The data mined on the customers’ feedbacks and complaints are vital quantifiable statistics that reflects the quality of services provided by Muscat Municipality. Such information provides avenues for MM to improve their municipal services and become the catalyst to transform Muscat Municipality to be a Learning Organisation, an organisation that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself to improve its services. MM will be the model government organisation which successfully transformed itself to be a service-centric learning organisation. The indirect impacts are; a. Prompt MM attention to address urgent issues raised by customers will improve business activities and better communication amongst the customers in the Governorate b. Due to easy feedback through the Contact Center, any discerning citizen and resident can provide feedback, thus making the Governorate clean, efficient and a desirable city which is a boost to tourism. Important lesson learnt from this initiatives; 1. Strong support and guidance from the Chairman and the Executive management. There is a summary of feedback for each Directorate and live feedback to Chairman’s office which indicates the commitment of the Chairman to improve the customer services. 2. Strong technical leadership from the IT Department is critical for the success of this initiative. 3. Engaging the customers’ right from the start is essential to ensure that their feedback, experiences and suggestions are factored into the revised process and embedded in the IT-based system.


Institution Name:		Muscat Municipality
Institution Type:		Government Agency
Contact Person:		Khalid Alhadhrami
Title:		Information Technology Developer
Telephone/ Fax:		24753363/ 24753375
Institution's / Project's Website:		www.mm.gov.om
E-mail:		13407@mm.gov.om
Address:		Seeb,Muscat,Sultanate of Oman
Postal Code:		121
City:		Seeb
State/Province:		Muscat
Country:		Oman

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information