Driving home Saturday night, I noticed that a grate on a storm drain in the alley was out of place, leaving a potentially dangerous surprise for an unsuspecting driver. But...another neighbor had already taken action, moving an orange traffic cone from a nearby construction site over to the missing grate. Thank you to a good neighbor. Immediate danger addressed, I filed an issue on the MyRichardson app.
Within less than an hour, I received an email stating, "The issue you submitted through the MyRichardson App has been resolved by one of our employees." Quick work, right? Maybe yes, maybe no. I've been fooled before by that word "resolved". See "Country Meadow Duck Pond" below. Further in the email is this caveat: "Sometimes issues are resolved by creating work orders for our employees, so just because this issue has been marked resolved, there may still need to be additional work done to complete the task."
In other words, "just because this issue has been marked resolved" doesn't mean the issue has been resolved. The City is making up their own definition of the word.
I asked ChatGPT, "If a customer service line told you that your issue has been 'resolved,' what would you interpret that to mean?"
ChatGPT's response: "If a customer service line says that an issue has been 'resolved,' it generally means they believe they've fully addressed or completed any actions needed to fix the issue, or they’ve done everything within their capacity. Ideally, it means the problem should no longer affect you."
To be fair, I checked on the issue this morning and it did get resvolved sometime overnight or early this morning. The grate is back in place. The traffic cone is back at the construction site. If the City did this, kudos to the City for the quick response.
The point of my blog post is not to complain about the City's quick response. It's to offer a suggestion. For better communication of what's actually the situation regarding issues reported on the MyRichardson app, how about changing just one word in the response to submissions. Just say, "The issue you submitted through the MyRichardson App has been received." Not necessarily resolved, just received. Better communication through more accurate language. How easy is that?
"Resolved, they insist.
But doubt lingers in my mind.
Is the problem fixed?"
— h/t ChatGPT
P.S. In the past, I experienced the frustration of being told by the City that my issue was resolved, when all that happened is that my issue was put on some department's backlog of issues. In that instance, the problem had to get worse, much worse (or so I claimed anyway), before I actually got someone from the City to do something, (scroll to the bottom of this old post: "Country Meadow Duck Pond"), but they did eventually resolve my issue. Thank you very much.
No comments:
Post a Comment