- January 18, 2025
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Palm Coast has been putting its citizen engagement platform, Palm Coast Connect, to effective use, reducing inefficiencies and improving interactions with residents, city staff members said during a City Council workshop Dec. 8
A city staff presentation to the council on Palm Coast Connect preceded a request: The city is due to renew its licenses with Salesforce — which provides the platform used to run Palm Coast Connect — and also wants to buy more.
Palm Coast Connect was created for the city by local software company Coastal Cloud, Mayor Milissa Holland’s employer, without charge, but maintaining it requires the city to buy licenses from Salesforce.
Palm Coast Connect provides an app and a website through which the public can interact with city staff, submitting complaints or forms such as permit applications or watching videos or presentations uploaded by staff.
The city uses it to track work orders and help tickets and reduce its response times, which have fallen from about seven or eight days to closer to one, a city staff member said during the presentation.
Managers have also used data from Palm Coast Connect to reduce overtime hours, Morton said.
"It’s helping us manage the process start to finish and see where we need improvement."
CYNTHIA SCHWEERS, director of citizen engagement
“It’s more than an app, and what we’re using Palm Coast Connect for is a complete tool, and the tool is allowing us unprecedented access … to managerial insight,” City Manager Matt Morton said.
“We’re opening everything up as much as we can to the public,” he added. “We’re bringing all of our talents to bear to solve problems outside of our silos.”
Employees have dashboards where they can see their own performance metrics, he said.
“We’re seeing friendly competitions and the search for greater efficiencies,” he said. In departments like utilities where service response time is especially important, “they’re learning amongst themselves how to bring those response times down.”
On of the more immediate benefits of Palm Coast Connect was its impact on the way residents contacted the city when they needed something.
So far this year, 38% of such cases (about 7,300) have been submitted on the platform. That saves the city money, the staff presentation pointed out, as operating and staffing a call center is expensive. Without Palm Coast Connect, the city would have to grow its call center by about 30%.
When she first began working for the city, Director of Citizen Engagement Cynthia Schweers said, the city’s customer service representatives wouldn’t necessarily know the end result of every call. Now, they do.
“We’ve been able to, every step of the way, be with the resident until the finished project, and evaluate it,” she said. Customers also get a survey option to rate their experience; anything below a three gets an extra look.
“It’s helping us manage the process start to finish and see where we need improvement,” Schweers said. “It’s accountability that we never had, so we’re very excited about it. ... The resident is getting that accountability; we’re able to be transparent in the community and also in management.”
During COVID-19, the city has also used the platform to hold the city’s annual photo contest, host Virtual Town Hall events and manage data produced from COVID-19 wastewater testing.
The city is also looking at the possibility of using Palm Coast Connect to help manage its public records requests, building inspections and social media accounts, as the software can alert staff about social media activity concerning the city using keyword tracking.
There are a number of different kinds of Salesforce licenses needed to run all these functions: One for customer case resolution, one for field service dispatch and work orders, one for the customer-facing portal on the Palm Coast Connect website, one that’s used to host the FAQ and how-to section of the website and another that’s used to display geographic and mapping information.
For 2021, that would all cost about $175,798, including the new licenses, according to the city presentation.
This year, it cost $104,515 — a sum the city staff presentation framed as about $1.19 per Palm Coast citizen per year, or about 10 cents per citizen per month.
The council did not vote at the Dec. 8 workshop, as votes occur only during regular business meetings. But only one council member, Councilman Ed Danko, raised concerns, asking about the way Salesforce handles privacy and security in light of lawsuits in the U.S. and Europe involving the company’s use of customer data. Staff replied that Salesforce itself doesn’t have access to customers’ personal information.
Holland said Palm Coast Connect is helping link the city government to its citizenry.
“When I first became elected four years ago, the citizens displayed and demonstrated that they did feel disconnected to the city,” she said. “...We weren’t able to make our decisions annually based on data and factual information coming in to us. I think the data, to me, is something that is a critical component of this. ... It’s an agile system, so we’re able to pivot.”
