6 mistakes cities make with citizen requests and how to fix them for good

Small cities run lean. You’re not choosing between “good” and “bad” systems, you’re choosing between doing everything or doing what matters.

But here’s the truth: poorly handled citizen requests create friction that burns out your team and breaks citizen trust.

In my role as CRM practice lead for municipalities at Gestisoft, I have seen how small, invisible inefficiencies can create major human irritants. The good news is that there are simple, yet structural solutions to reverse this logic.

Here are the six most common mistakes I encounter in managing citizen requests, and more importantly, how to correct them permanently, even with limited resources.

Mistake #1: Letting requests come in from everywhere

You're back from a two-week vacation. Peace and quiet at last... until you open your email inbox. 327 messages are waiting for you.

Urgent follow-ups, newsletters, advertising emails, a few automated messages, and maybe, in the middle of it all, a really important message.

You know you'll have to sort through it all. And you also know that, despite your best efforts, you may miss something important or deal with it a little too late.

In a city, when citizen requests come in from all sides without coordination, that's exactly what happens.

But instead of a simple forgotten email, it's citizen expectations that fall through the cracks.

When requests come in from all over the place, it's not just the system that becomes disorganized, it's the people.

Employees waste time tracking down requests.

Managers lose sight of the big picture. And citizens lose confidence.

Centralization does not mean locking everything into a single portal. The right system is one that adapts to your population:

• A comprehensive 311 platform for more connected cities;
• A few clear and consistent entry points for municipalities with a high proportion of retirees or citizens who are not very digitally savvy.

The challenge is not technology, but consistency, so that every request, regardless of its channel of origin, is traceable, tracked, and handled with the same rigor.

Mistake #2: treat requests differently depending on the services

At the airport, everyone does the same thing when they arrive: they look at the display boards. A single board provides an overview of all flights.

Now imagine there are no screens. Imagine that each gate has its own logic, its own schedules, its own delays.

It would be chaos.

This is what happens in many cities where each department manages requests in its own way, without a shared system.

Each municipal department works with its own tools, its own constraints, its own emergencies. And from the outside, this diversity of approaches gives the impression of a disordered system.

Citizens don't see the internal efforts; they only perceive an inconsistent and therefore frustrating experience.

For example: a citizen reports a pothole; a team goes out, finds a leak in the water pipe, and transfers the request to another department. The first request is forgotten, the second is added to an already heavy pile.

No one did anything wrong. It's simply that no team has a complete view of the process. And so the real urgency gets lost in the internal mechanics.

What is needed is not to standardize everything, but to speak the same language.

• Set up a common, clear, and shared triage system.
• Route each request according to this logic, regardless of the department responsible.
• And above all, use a centralized system that allows everyone to see the whole picture, without erasing each person's own methods.

When a city adopts this common operational language, something subtle changes. Citizens feel a sense of consistency.

A city that manages to speak with one voice instantly seems more organized.

That is the power of shared sorting: unifying without standardizing, and giving municipal coordination the fluidity it deserves.

Mistake #3: Relying on memory, spreadsheets, or disconnected tools

In many cities, the real knowledge base has a first name.

It's Joe, in public works, who knows where the pipes have been since 1998.

It's Sue, in customer service, who remembers recurring requests from the same neighborhood.

It's Paul, in public works, who knows the unwritten shortcuts to get around the unexpected.

And as long as these people are there, everything works. But the day they are absent, everything slows down because the information is not in a system, it is in their heads.

This “oral” model has long been sufficient. But as generations change and workforces fragment, it becomes a silent risk.

Every time an employee leaves, it's not just a person we lose, it's a piece of the city's operational memory.

New teams start from scratch, mistakes are repeated, and decisions are made based on incomplete data.

Creating a shared knowledge base is an act of resilience. It means documenting recurring responses, proven processes, and lessons learned from past situations.

It means giving every employee, regardless of seniority, access to the city's collective knowledge.

And when this knowledge is linked to citizen requests, it ceases to be a simple archive: it comes alive.

We no longer “solve” isolated problems, we enrich the collective memory with each intervention.

Cities that make this shift discover an unexpected advantage: they become more agile.

A new hire can understand in a day what used to take months to learn. Managers see trends emerging. And citizens benefit from a new consistency, even when faces change internally.

Because ultimately, true municipal continuity does not depend on individuals, but on the organized transfer of knowledge.

Mistake #4: lack of follow-through with the population

Have you ever ordered something online, received confirmation... and then nothing? First you wait, then you get impatient, then you start to wonder: is it really coming?

It's the same for citizen requests. The lack of follow-up creates a void that citizens often fill with mistrust. What was a simple request becomes a source of frustration, sometimes even a complaint.

This silence is costly. It ties up teams in unnecessary follow-ups, clouds the perception of public service, and undermines confidence in the city's ability to listen. Internally, employees find themselves responding to follow-up calls rather than addressing the underlying issues. Externally, citizens feel ignored.

However, follow-up does not require more resources, only more rigorous communication.

Automating updates by email or text message, providing a portal where everyone can check the status of their request, and closing the loop with a clear closing message. All of this sends a simple signal: “We've heard you, and we're moving forward.”

The real issue is not technological, it's relational. A city that communicates its follow-ups shows that it respects the time of its citizens as much as that of its employees. And this transparency, even on deadlines, is better than the most polite silence.

Municipalities that adopt this reflex see a double effect: fewer calls and greater trust. Because when it comes to public service, silence is always interpreted as an absence, whereas a simple message is often enough to preserve the relationship.

Mistake #5: Not sharing the data

Every day, cities accumulate thousands of pieces of information: requests, processing times, types of incidents, precise locations. But without integrated tools, this data piles up without ever being transformed into knowledge. It lies dormant in Excel files, emails, and isolated systems, and with it, a whole wealth of learning potential remains untapped.

What is often missing is not the data, but the big picture.

Without a dashboard, it is impossible to know where requests are concentrated, whether turnaround times are improving, or which areas of the city are consuming the most resources.

We then rely on impressions: “it seems like we're getting more calls,” “it seems to me that this neighborhood requires more maintenance,” but we can't prove it.

And when it comes time to defend a budget, argue for more staff, or rethink a process, decisions are based on anecdotes rather than facts.

Setting up a clear dashboard means giving the city back its analytical power. It allows managers to identify trends, anticipate peak periods, and detect blind spots. It provides elected officials with a factual basis for supporting their choices, and field teams with feedback on their real impact.

Data does not replace the intuition of teams, but it reinforces it. It transforms feelings into signals, signals into decisions, and decisions into collective learning.

A city that analyzes its data no longer reacts to emergencies, it prevents them. And that is where request management ceases to be an administrative mechanism and becomes a true intelligent management tool.

Mistake #6: not analyzing historical data

Every year, my neighbor plants her tomatoes too early. And every year, she complains about the May frost. Yet every spring, she does it again.

When I tell her to look at her gardening notes, she replies, “I know, but this year it's going to be fine.”

Cities often do the same thing: they respond to the same problems over and over again without taking advantage of their own historical data.

Every citizen request contains valuable information: a location, a time period, a type of problem. Analyze this data over six months, and you'll see trends emerge: potholes before the thaw, water main breaks in certain high-pressure areas, recurring complaints about garbage collection after holidays. These are not anomalies: they are cycles. And a city that knows how to read them can take action before citizens need to complain.

Switching to proactive mode is not about striving for perfection, it's about striving for preparedness.

It means planning resources before peak periods. It means communicating deadlines before they are questioned. It means showing that you learn from your own history.

Being proactive does not mean predicting everything, but being ready to understand more quickly before the situation explodes. It is the hallmark of cities that are no longer content to simply serve their populations, but learn from trends.

Towards learning cities

Correcting these errors does not mean hiring more staff or working longer hours. Rather, it means equipping ourselves differently, so that every effort counts twice: once to solve the problem, and once to learn from it.

The cities I work with demonstrate this every day: transformation is not about technology, but how it is used. A well-designed platform does not replace humans, it gives them clarity, memory, and time.

In Laval, for example, we helped the municipal team overhaul their citizen request management system. You may read more about this project here.

Every citizen request is a piece of data, and every piece of data is an opportunity for improvement. When this information flows freely, when teams see what others are doing, when managers make decisions based on facts rather than impressions, the city ceases to be a collection of isolated services. It becomes a living system, capable of understanding and correcting itself.