Service Request #1: What Happens When I Call 311?

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1:17Hello, beautiful nerds. For the next couple of weeks, we're going to be airing a new series we're producing in collaboration with Campside Media. We're calling it Service Request, and it's hosted by longtime 99PI producer and editor Delaney Hall. It's a fun and joyful and detailed deep dive into stories about infrastructure. We're looking at the nuts and bolts of how it actually works and the people who maintain it. I am very excited for you to hear it and also to get involved because we will be taking your questions about infrastructure and answering them in future episodes. Here's our first story.

1:56I guess to start, just tell me about your experience with Mr. Softy. Mr. Softy. Mr. Softy, bane of my existence. This is Christopher Johnson. He's a supervising producer at 99 % Invisible. And one of the first things I learned about him when we started working together was that he hated ice cream trucks. That f***ing jingle comes along and it's like, oh my God, that kill me now.

2:30So it's that it's the end of the song that's just like taunting you because, you know, it's going to start again.

2:40About five or six years ago, COVID was just starting to hit and Christopher was spending a lot of time locked down at home. He just moved into an apartment in Washington Heights, a neighborhood at the very top of Manhattan. And he was up on the 12th floor, high enough that he did not think he'd be dealing with a ton of street noise. But then the next day and the next day and the next day, I'm hearing Mr. Softee pull up 12, 13 stories down, park on the corner, wait for the kids, I guess. And there are multiple Mr. Softies. Like, there's one like two blocks down, and because I'm high so high up, I can hear the one two blocks down, the one that's just downstairs, the one that's a couple of blocks behind me, and they're just, it feels like at a certain point I'm being trolled by Mr.

3:36Softie. After weeks of this, Christopher got so fed up that he took action. He decided to call 3-1-1. 311 is a hotline that provides quick and easy access to all the information you might want about city services. It's also the place where people often go to complain. And as Christopher interacted with 311, trying to solve this Mr. Softie problem, he started to wonder, how in the world does the city keep track of all of these calls? Because in New York City, there's what, 9 million people. They're taking calls and fire from all different directions across all the boroughs, around the smallest complaints, giant complaints.

4:22How on earth can they respond and keep track of all of that?

4:35I'm Delaney Hall, and this is Service Request, a new show from 99 % Invisible and Campside Media. We're interested in the vast and hidden machinery of modern life. The pipes, the wires, the tubes and tunnels beneath your feet. Basically, all the infrastructure that no one really thinks about until something goes wrong. When something in your city breaks, like a busted streetlight or a pothole, you can call 311, file a report, and the city hopefully fixes it. But when you want to understand how your city actually works, that's where this show comes in. Think of us as the 311 of podcasting. We want you to send us your questions about infrastructure, and then we will investigate them and hopefully figure out the answers.

5:25For our very first episode, we have this service request from Christopher. How does 311 actually work? Because it turns out the system you use to report problems and complaints is its own kind of infrastructure. One that has quietly changed how cities across the country actually work. I'm so embarrassed to talk about this now, but like, I went full tilt, Karen. Let's stick with Christopher's story for a moment. When Mr. Softee got to be too much, he started Googling. And he discovered a law that had been passed about 20 years ago that said ice cream trucks had to turn off their jingles when they were idling or stopped.

6:09When you park, you have to turn that s*** off. And I was like, I got you, Mr. Softee, because they were not doing that. They were full on like posting up on the corners below my apartment for a half hour. That's a long time in Mr. Softee jingle time. Absolutely. That's how many repetitions of the jingle. Probably like, what, 500? Hundreds. Hundreds. Absolutely. But who's counting? Hundreds. This was the moment when Christopher decided to call 3-1-1. He figured he had something real to report. Mr. Softee was breaking the law and he wanted the city to do something about it. And what do you remember about the call?

6:54Just take me through it as much as you can remember. I remember that you get a greeting and initially they try to kind of, you know, if it's this issue, go this way. If it's that issue, go that way. And at first I thought, of course, there's no real person that's going to pick this up. And I was like, okay, this is classic. I'm being routed down a kind of like to a dead end. Yeah. But I hung on and someone picks up. Like a real person. A real person, a real live person, sounds like a New Yorker, New York accent, you know, very friendly, like ready to help. And they ask me questions like, of course, what is the complaint?

7:33And I tell them that, you know, at this point, the Mr. Softy, the ice cream truck keeps pulling up. What they do then is they ask you these like very specific questions. That's one of the things I remember is that they're like, which days of the week, Sunday through Saturday? And I'm like, every single day. And then they say, around what time? Best case scenario, they're trying to figure out when they're going to send someone to try to catch this in this ice cream truck in the act. And your sense is that it's probably to dispatch someone to to ticket perhaps the ice cream truck. That's right. OK, OK, got it.

8:16Christopher made his complaint, the operator took his details, and then he waited to see if anything would happen next. And as he waited, he started wondering what happens on the other side of the phone when someone calls 311. That's when we come back. Thank you. to the intuitive technology and spacious sophistication of the Buick Enclave. Every Buick vehicle leads to more dynamic drives, more captivating discoveries, and more rewarding moments every day. Visit Buick.com to discover luxury that can be yours right now. That's Buick.com. Buick. Exceptional by design.

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11:51Now available in Canada, too. Go to Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash invisible for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash invisible. To start, we'll go back to the days before 3-1-1. In the 1980s and 90s, 3-1-1 did not exist in New York. In fact, it didn't exist anywhere in the country. And when people had issues, even mundane ones like potholes or noise complaints, They were calling 911. In some places like Baltimore, about 60 % of 911 calls were for non-emergencies. And it was totally gumming up the system. Wait times were growing and real emergencies were getting lost in the noise.

12:38And so in 1996, Baltimore officials launched the first 311 in the country to take the pressure off of their overwhelmed 911 lines. A few years later, Chicago started its own 311 service, and then Houston. These early systems were pretty simple. They were basically just call centers that could route you to the right department. But when Michael Bloomberg was elected the mayor of New York City in 2001, he had bigger ambitions. He had the vision of taking the 311 apparatus and really expanding it into that full-scale customer service operation. This is Joseph Morrisrow. He's been in charge of 311 in New York City since 2006.

13:24I believe I have the best job in all of New York City. Better than the rat czar? Better than the rat czar, who we work closely with. Michael Bloomberg wanted New York's 311 to handle pretty much any question or complaint a New Yorker could dream up, way beyond what other cities were doing. The idea for New York City was if 311 is going to be the central point, we need it to be for everything. So it wasn't just infrastructure calls or questions about what day is my recycle and what day is my sanitation pickup. But if it was a need for homeless services, if you needed food assistance, we needed to have that information in our system and also have customers call us to be able to get that information.

14:09That sounds like a huge task just on the back end, like getting ready to open a call center that can answer any call that comes in from a citizen. And before you could start answering the public's questions, the city had to do the work of organizing all of that information themselves. Do you know how they went about that? You actually just kind of recapped the first year of work by a large number of people. There was no large call center in New York City at that time. Different agencies, as we call them here, may have had their own call center. The Department of Transportation may have had people who answered the phones.

14:54And the Department of Sanitation had a group of folks who took calls from the public. But there was no large call center. So to solve that problem, the first take was we will consolidate all of them, not just pull the people in, but also put it into one single location. The team also had to build the software for accepting and tracking calls. And most dauntingly, they had to assemble every piece of information New Yorkers might possibly ask about and then cram it all into a searchable database for the operators. And they pulled all that information into a knowledge management database, which then allowed the agent handling the call to access that new system, that new CRM system, to do a search very similar to a Google search now.

15:44And then, boom, they had the answer to the question, and they were able to give that answer to the customer. Wow, you're describing it as, you know, a database or a content management system. And I'm thinking of it as like this Bible of everything you could possibly know about New York City. And it's amazing to think about the scope of that. It really is. NYC 311 launched on March 9th, 2003. The first call to come in was a noise complaint from Jackson Heights, Queens. And soon, Bloomberg was hyping the new hotline everywhere he went. If you want to know how to register your child for school, call 3-1-1.

16:30Want to know what time the bus will pick up and drop off your child? Call 3-1-1. You can also cool off at one of the city's public beaches. For the location and hours of the nearest beach, all you got to do is dial 3-1-1. 311 has helped more than 216 ,000 New Yorkers find resources to stop smoking. These days, New York's 311 receives more than 17 million calls a year, along with millions of contacts by text and through their website and their app. The call center is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by operators waiting to take your questions and complaints. One of them is Samantha Pierce.

17:10So take us through, how do you answer the phone? And what do you ask? Right. So there's a standard greeting. Thank you for calling 3-1-1. My name is Samantha. How can I assist you? Samantha was born and raised in New York City, and she's been working with 3-1-1 since 2013. She says that the first thing a caller will encounter is an interactive voice response system, an IVR. That's the menu that Christopher navigated when he called with his Mr. Softy complaint. It basically figured out where to direct his call. And that means that once he ended up with an operator, they probably had a pretty good sense of what he was calling about.

17:51It just kind of helps smooth out the call a bit and gets the agent on the roll. Another thing that's really cool about the system is that when that topic populates, it'll take that agent to the information that they need related to that topic. So it kind of gets a jumpstart on finding what the customer needs. Noise complaints often top the list of issues that people call about, followed by illegal parking and questions about heat and hot water. But knowing the broad strokes of the issue is not enough for the operators. When we train our agents, we train them to probe because our system is not set up like Google, right?

18:31You go on the Google and you type in a topic and it's going to give you what you need. We need to know the what, but really our system is based on the why. So if you call in and you say, hey, I need to talk to the Department of Finance about this parking ticket I received, that's not going to be enough for the agent to assist. What exactly do you need? Why do you need to speak to them? What is the issue with the parking ticket? We need to get to the why. And that's really how our system is navigated. You know, you got to get a little nosy sometimes. And, you know, that's just the way our system is set up.

19:06And it's not like you're just following a script. You have to be on your toes interacting with a real human being who has a problem and figuring out what the root of it is. Absolutely. And then another thing that's really important is that a lot of people are not happy for good reason. When I coach my team, I tell them, you know, the empathy is so important because if you had sewage coming into your basement, you'd be a little upset as well. And when they answer that phone, I tell them they are the city, right? They might have a complaint about Department of Sanitation or Department of Finance, whatever the case is.

19:45They don't get to speak directly to those agencies. They're speaking to you. And in that moment, sometimes unfairly, you might get the brunt of their frustration. But if you help them to the best of your ability, by the end of the call, they're grateful. And so what do you want the voice of the city to sound like? I want the voice of the city to be, number one, helpful, accurate, and familiar because we are not outsourced. We're in New York City and most of us are from New York City. Like we know New York because we are New York. And I think that translates to how we service New York. Right. Okay, so you get one of these calls.

20:28You got to make sure people are sort of calmed down enough to give you the information that you need. You figure out what's actually going on with them. What happens next? How do you route that call? Okay, so the main method, I think, for reporting customers' issues is through service requests. where a lot of them are preset, meaning you're just clicking on this customer wants to report a pothole. They'll click it in the sheet or the service request. It's already preset. So you're really just filling in, you know, information. Once we send those off, they go automatically to the responding agency.

21:06The responding agency determines how long it's going to take to fix said issue. Once the service request is submitted, the customer gets what's called a service request number, and that allows them to track the progress of their complaint. Got it. Okay. There was this report that came out a few years ago about 311 with a section about memorable calls. And just to read a few of those aloud, you know, someone said, I'd like to file a noise complaint against my refrigerator. Or can I claim my dog as a dependent on my taxes? Or I would like to report a ghost in my window. Can you tell me about some of the maybe strangest or most memorable 311 calls you've received?

21:53I remember when I was a call taker, there was a customer that was reporting that her downstairs neighbor was sending vibrations into her apartment. And she was adamant and really insistent. And this is the thing, right? You're supposed to take the calls at face value. Right. So you can't say, that's not happening. What are you talking about? You can't say that. You have to do your best to try to figure out, hey, maybe it could be this. Like, is there something going on with the building? Is it like an unstable foundation? Once you rule out like kind of the real solutions that we have, you kind of have to just be honest with the customer and say, I don't think that we can take a report for the vibrations your neighbor is beaming to you from below.

22:34Right. Like there's no agency that handles mysterious vibrations. Right. Exactly. They might be working on it. I'm not sure. And then on a more serious note, I'm curious what kind of calls are like the hardest to take, whether that's emotionally or logistically. I think the hardest calls to take are just related to the complexities or the challenges of New York City living, like the competitive housing market and people calling and saying, like, I legitimately can't afford to leave or live here. Like, what do you do with that? I think that that's a more serious topic in terms of people that are really trying to find an affordable, safe place to live.

23:23Right. But there's just also, there's always like day-to-day challenges of New York City. It's a noisy place. Some people don't do well with that. It can kind of get to you sometimes. Those calls always, they kind of leave you a little, a little sad.

23:43New York City is a noisy place. That brings us back to Christopher. He made his Mr. Softy complaints anonymously, like a coward. And so he never got a service request number, which means we can't actually track what happened to his specific complaint. What we do know is that it would have likely been routed to the Department of Environmental Protection, the agency responsible for mitigating noise pollution. I also went digging around on the 311 website to better understand noise complaints, and honestly, I was kind of amazed by what I found. 311 has created this incredibly specific taxonomy of annoying sounds.

24:25You can report air conditioners, alarms, banging, pounding, and moving furniture, which is its own category. There's boilers, construction, dogs, leaf blowers, music, televisions, fireworks, generators, houses of worship, parks, pools, and beaches. And if you scroll way, way down to the end of the list, you'll find ice cream trucks. Which clearly means that Christopher is not the only person in New York afflicted by Mr. Softee. To me, there's something incredible about this list. It's like the city has somehow managed to catalog every possible way that people drive each other crazy. Every grievance is accounted for.

25:10It makes me think that the way 311 operators see the city is just different. Oh, oh yeah, definitely. I have a deeper understanding, I guess, of how things work here. I have a deeper understanding and appreciation for just city planning. But beyond that, just you start to see things and you immediately think about what you would be putting in the system to fix it. But like I remember about five years ago, there was a really specific process for disposing of electronics, specifically televisions. You couldn't just put them out with your regular trash. So I remember my husband and I were walking and I saw like a tube TV just sitting in front of someone's property.

25:53I said, oh, my goodness, what are they doing? You can't put that there. And I went down this whole description of what you had to do and what the penalty this person is going to get a ticket. Why would they do this? And I look over at my husband, he's just staring at me like, what? You're really passionate about these TVs. That was about, I would say, maybe four years ago. And as recently as last week, he will call me and say, hey, you know, I saw a TV sitting outside of this house. Like, what are you going to do about it? Because he knows I was really bothered by people. Why aren't you following the process?

26:26Call 3-1-1 so you can find out what to do with this TV. So yeah, that's the lens that I look at the city through. Just, hey, how can I fix this? That is so funny. Like to walk through your neighborhood, just knowing like, I know who handles that. I know who handles that. You should not be doing that. It's like you sort of have this code, this city code, you know? Right. And then I am the 311 for my friends and family. Sometimes I don't like to tell people that I work here just because they're going to text you and call you and ask you questions all the time. And while I remember a lot of the stuff, there's 7 ,000 different individual pieces of information.