Who ya gonna call? The Sarasota County Call Center

Vacation checklist: kayak, sunscreen, phone call to the Sarasota County Call Center. Before an upcoming kayak trip one year, a Sarasota County resident called to ask if the county could remove all of the alligators from its waterways so she would feel safe.

During water restrictions a few years ago, another woman called and asked if she could water her lawn. She figured she had banked some water by not bathing for five days.

The county has increased the promotion of its 861-5000 number, from tagging the number onto press releases to employees wearing T-shirts bearing the number at parades and events. The repetition helps the public to remember the phone number, said Dan Wuethrich, the center’s operation manager.

It’s clearly working.

But as alternative methods of communication gain popularity, the Sarasota County Call Center is working to rebrand itself.

“We’re not just a switchboard,” Wuethrich said.

Wuethrich wants his office to become more of a contact center, through which people can use multiple methods to get the information they need. Emails are becoming an increasingly popular method of contact; the center receives about 150 a month on average.

The county is exploring starting an online chat on the website to assist visitors in real time. Residents and visitors can get a lot of information on the county’s website and sometimes they just need help navigating it, he said.

Wuethrich doesn’t want the center to be just a place where people who call in get transferred to other people.

Instead, each agent has a database of frequently asked questions he or she can search. It includes topics ranging from what time the public transportation stops on a certain street to how to get utilities turned on or off.

“We are the front door to Sarasota County,” Wuethrich said. “We want people to have a positive experience — it could be the only experience they have.”

What it takes to be an agent
Agents have to have a great personality and not get tired of repeating the same answers over and over during the day.

“It means wanting to help people,” Wuethrich said.

Some customers are unhappy when they call, frustrated with a problem they are having. They need someone to say, “How can I help you?” Wuethrich said. Even if the agent doesn’t know the answer, he or she will try to find out.

Residents and visitors even call about non-county-related issues and events. Jane Idol, a call center agent, has been getting phone calls about the Holiday Tour of Lights trolley. It doesn’t matter that it’s not a county event — she just looked up the information online and relayed it to the customer.

“Google is your friend,” she said.

Most of the agents have lived in the county for a while, and several have worked in other county departments, and that helps, Idol said. When a customer asks about an event or an issue, locals usually have an idea of what it is.

Not all the calls the agents receive are from Sarasota, though. Some are from people who are considering moving to the area. Others are wrong numbers — for example, the center gets a lot of calls from southern California, because there is an organization there called SCAT, too.

Wuethrich said the center generally receives positive feedback from callers and emailers, even those who may have started the conversation unhappy.

Each agent ends the phone call by asking if he or she can help with anything else. The most popular answer: the winning lottery ticket numbers.

#Trending
Although the county communications department manages the county’s Twitter account, Martin Haire, a call center agent, keeps tabs on social media to see what’s happening in the county and get an idea of what calls it might receive.

“I love social media,” he said. “This is the way to find breaking news.”

Haire can sometimes identify daily or weekly trends in the calls based on activity on social media. For example, when the Sheriff’s Office released the news about the unlicensed permitting operation, Haire accurately predicted the call center would be getting questions on the topic, and he made a page for the frequently asked questions database.

Accidents and bus delays are always a trend, he said. The call center can also get a head’s up when the season is starting to end and the snowbirds migrate back up north — the calls start rolling in to disconnect utilities.

By the numbers
17,000 — phone calls per month

150 — emails and service requests per month

17 — average response time in seconds

11 — agents for email and phone contact

Top FAQ topics
1. Sarasota County Area Transit

2. Permitting

3. Landfill information

4. Library information

Oddballs
Whether some people are pranking the call center agents, it has received some strange calls over the years:

• A woman asked if all the alligators in the county’s waterways could be removed before her kayaking trip, so she could feel safe in the water.

• During water restrictions a few years ago, a woman called and asked if she could water her lawn if she didn’t take a bath for five days.

• Someone called in asking what day it was. The call agent told him it was a Friday.