QMATIC Solution Helps Improve the Scottsdale City Courts

The Scottsdale City Court in Arizona takes pride in being on the technological cutting edge. Embracing the most innovative customer flow management and data capture technology and integrating it with Arizona's state-mandated data bank and case management solution has put the Scottsdale City Court in the enviable position of being a model of efficiency in an often chaotic sector of government service.

Realizing that the best way to improve operations lay in the ability to collect daily statistics on who was being served– and for how long– the Court adopted a QMATIC Customer Flow Management system in 1999 and has since augmented that technology with solutions that consistently meet their evolving goals and address the challenges they have encountered along the way.

The situation
The City Court is a busy place, serving roughly 7000 citizens per month. Defendants must be signed in, directed to the specific courtroom handling his or her case and then "settled" in a timely manner. To further complicate matters, the Court's defendants have widely divergent needs, little understanding of what is expected of them and often a limited command of the English language. How, then, to get people to the right place and the right staff member at the right time?

Managing a crowded lobby full of defendants and their families, law enforcement personnel and attorneys is only part of the story. Beginning with intake and ending with the post adjudication settlement of fines and other sanctions, each defendant must follow a specific path in a time-sensitive environment. It is therefore no surprise that a municipal court system serving hundreds of defendants per day is subject to significant backups should a single inefficiency arise in any stage of the process. Seeking a solution to multiple problems, the Court turned to
QMATIC.

Customer tracking
Before adopting the QMATIC solution, the Scottsdale City Court had a simple "take a paper ticket" system, which left the courthouse staff without the ability to collect and track customer volumes and wait times. Incorporating the QMATIC self-serve lobby management system into their operations allowed the Court to capture and monitor customer volumes, wait times and transaction times, critical data that could be used to properly allocate staff and other resources.

Court Services Supervisor Emily Cohen observes that "QMATIC provides the Public Service staff with the ability to track [each] litigant's purpose, time in the queue and time of service, and it gives the staff the ability to know the status of our lobby at any time. These same statistics are used to produce expectations for the staff members. Collectively, this information gives more confidence to the public and staff as to the status of each individual person."

Serving customers with different needs
Since their customers were there for different reasons and thus required the assistance of staff with specific expertise, the Court needed a way to categorize individuals in order to direct them to the appropriate person. By adding multiple "self-select" categories for customers to choose from, Court personnel were able to identify and select customers based on services that were needed at that moment. This allowed staff to set service goals and easily address the quicker transactions and clear those customers from the queue, resulting in reduced customer wait times and increased customer satisfaction.

Variances in personnel skills and transaction time
Prior to incorporating the QMATIC solution, staff had a difficult time predicting what specific expertise would be needed at a given time and how long each specialized transaction would take. Now equipped with multiple categories for customers to choose from, the Court is better able to predict the types of skills needed to serve those customer as well as when they are needed. This enabled the Court to move staff to different stations and identify any cross-training required to keep the whole operation running smoothly.

Expediting customer flow while complying with state rules
The State of Arizona mandated that all courts use AZTECH, a proprietary database and ticketing system. This added another step to the customer flow process, generating additional (and often duplicate) tickets and leaving customers confused about what they were supposed to do. By installing the QMATIC API solution, the Court was able to create a custom user interface to the state system, incorporating data from several applications and allowing courtroom bailiffs to have just one application to work with.

This integration allowed the bailiffs to print case disposition tickets in the courtroom, eliminating both redundancies in paperwork and the need for attorneys to physically escort their clients to the ticket printers and the lobby/waiting area. The Court has thus been able to achieve performance goals while simultaneously eliciting positive attorney feedback and a significant reduction in customer complaints.

"Before the API capability was installed in the courtroom, instruction to the defendant could be confusing and lengthy. After its implementation, the directive to the defendant is concise and it enhances the perception of the Court's quality of customer service," notes Samantha Mounsey, Court Services Supervisor.

Staff training lead time
The Scottsdale City Court realized that training new hires quickly and efficiently would reduce wait times for customers and ease the burden for existing staff. The QMATIC solution allowed the Court to direct simple transactions to the new hires and then gradually increase the difficulty of their caseloads (along with their responsibilities) as their skills progressed. This allowed the Court to allocate resources appropriately without placing an undue burden on more seasoned staff while at the same time cross-training all their personnel and reducing customer wait times.

Serving non-english-speaking customers
On a day-to-day basis it was difficult to predict the number of Spanish-speaking customers seeking assistance. This resulted in backlogs while management took the time to seek back-up staff that could handle those customers. The realtime information provided by the QMATIC system helped management and counter staff monitor the number of Spanish-speaking customers in the queue, allowing the Court to staff the counters accordingly. In addition, language choice data collected via the customer interface allowed the Court to identify how many bilingual staff needed to be on hand for the entire court system.

The results
The results of integrating the QMATIC solution have been significant. The court's average wait-times have decreased by 17.5% and maximum wait-times for service have gone from 12:20 to 10:48, a decrease of 12.5%. Of note is that these improvements in service quality occurred over a period where the flow of customer traffic increased by 24%. (see charts)

QMATIC has helped more than 25,000 organizations worldwide deliver better customer service and maximize their organizational efficiency while at the same time reducing operating costs. We can do the same for you.