Taipei City Government

Taipei City’s 1999 Taipei Citizen Hotline won the top award in the 2019 GVM Service Industry Survey in the 1999 Citizen Hotline category. Taipei City Mayor Ko Wen-Je attended the function on the afternoon of December 2 to receive the award on behalf of the Taipei City Government. He emphasized that the most crucial factor of the 1999 Taipei Citizen Hotline’s success is the resolution of its internal customers’ problems (i.e. his city government colleagues).

During his speech, Mayor Ko pointed out that the 1999 Taipei Citizen Hotline is honored to receive the top award for the 2019 GVM Service Industry Survey in the 1999 Citizen Hotline category. The 1999 Taipei Citizen Hotline is a 24-hour service available throughout the year, receiving 130,000 calls every month, or 4,000 calls daily. The calls will sometimes double in the event of a typhoon, and therefore the hotline utilization rate can be erratic and unpredictable.

Mayor Ko expressed that he upholds a certain philosophy towards the 1999 Taipei Citizen Hotline in that the most daunting challenge faced by a firm is to change its corporate culture; therefore, after he came into office, he demanded that city government resolve the problems of its internal customers before tackling external customers’ problems. In light of this, the first step he took was to chat with his colleagues in order to ascertain what their pet peeves were in daily routine work. A list of their common problems was compiled and he instructed his colleagues to solve them one at a time.

The mayor mentioned that the system requires the use of real names because hoax calls were often received from anonymous callers. It was evident that the authenticity of the calls was significantly improved by requesting the callers to submit their real names, the reason being that people willing to state their full name, phone number, and address are less likely to make hoax calls. Another aspect of the system is to authorize the supervisor to decide whether to pursue a case that has received 3 complaints or to close the case directly; the reason being that the same individual may probably make 1,000 a month, so if this issue is not handled adequately it will bring down the morale of city government.

Ko reiterated finally that it is imperative to solve the problems of internal customers before attempting to resolve external customers’ complaints, and in this case city government employees are the internal customers. This is the main contributor to the 1999 Taipei Citizen Hotline’s success.