Raleigh to launch self-service portal for residents
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By
Frank Konkel
Officials in the North Carolina city say they want to simplify the way its 500,000 residents engage with its agencies through its “Ask Raleigh” customer experience center.
LAS VEGAS — This summer, the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, plans to launch a new digital self-service portal that will give its half-million residents a simple, intuitive way to request services, report issues and access records online.
City officials expect the “Ask Raleigh” customer experience center to go live for the public in early July, providing both a single destination for all city services and also the means for users to receive updates and track the progress of requests in real time.
“Currently, if you look at the city of Raleigh, there are thousands of phone numbers to get information from,” Chris King, city of Raleigh Service Management Lead, told Route Fifty at the ServiceNow Knowledge 2025 conference in Las Vegas. “There has never been a consolidated place at the city to call and ask for help.”
Over the years, King said residents with inquiries would “glom onto whatever department would give them the friendliest answer,” which was far from ideal considering city personnel work across 20 departments, including fire, police, IT and parks.
Perhaps frustrated by confusion over who to engage, King said “a significant portion” of Raleigh’s 911 calls are non-emergency calls from people trying to handle other city issues, which increases the risk for people in actual life-threatening situations.
“That is not awesome,” King said. “We’re hoping that with ‘Ask Raleigh,’ people will know to start there.”
The Ask Raleigh citizen portal builds off a years-long Smart Raleigh initiative started under former Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin that is “dedicated to innovating, developing and deploying smart technology” throughout the city.
King said a core component of that initiative was standardizing IT processes and workflow across city operations. The city turned to Servos to implement IT firm ServiceNow’s technology — including its automated cloud-based platform — across its enterprise, upon which it built a centralized self-service employee portal. The internal self-service portal, King said, allowed the city to do away with select manual processes and improve employee efficiency.
“Not only did the technology help but it made us look at refocusing our processes,” King said. “What is our process, what is wrong with it, and how can we make it better?”
Over time, Raleigh replaced six legacy IT service management systems with ServiceNow and repurposed six of eight employees in the city’s IT call center to perform other city services, generating some $315,000 in annual savings. According to city officials, avoiding redundant manual data entry through digitizing forms for HR, IT, facilities and payroll saved employees more than 1,300 hours annually.
Ask Raleigh will similarly be built off ServiceNow technology through Servos following approval by the city council. Down the line, King said he hopes Raleigh can add more features to its citizen portal, including the ability for residents to simply speak questions in whatever language they prefer.