The City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Permits, Licenses and Inspections (Pittsburgh PLI) has launched online chat support to provide citizens with immediate and interactive support during the COVID-19 Crisis.
In anticipation of the Department closing public access in compliance with COVID-19 prevention measures, Pittsburgh PLI, working in partnership with Computronix, acted quickly to integrate real-time chat support on OneStopPGH, the City’s self-service portal for licensing, permitting, application, and plan review. OneStopPGH is powered by POSSE PLS, a COTS+ software solution and automation platform from Computronix, providing full scope permitting, licensing and planning services.
The possibility for chat integration across all POSSE Powered citizen portals was first unveiled at C3 2019, Computronix’ annual client conference. With the COVID Crisis demanding adaptive technology to best equip work-from-home staff, Sarah Kinter, Acting Director, Licensing and Administration, Pittsburgh PLI, recognized an immediate opportunity to augment the City’s OneStopPGH portal with an interactive chat feature supported by the City’s service experts. Commensurate with the immediacy of the response required, the feature was fast tracked into the City of Pittsburgh’s testing environment in less than 72 hours, an achievable timeline for other jurisdictions considering comparable augmentation of self-service civic portals ‘Powered by POSSE.’
“Kudos to Sarah Kinter and the entire team at Pittsburgh PL, for your decisive actions to augment citizen support AND staff resources in response to this rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation,” said Gord Meeberg, VP Business Development, Computronix. “It is gratifying to see civic leaders expanding their POSSE solutions with immediate and achievable augmentations such as this to maintain service excellence in these challenging times. Given the critical need for seamless communication between government agencies and citizens during the pandemic, we are committed to offering citizen chat integration as a complimentary implementation service to all of our valued clients currently leveraging the POSSE Platform to maintain essential civic services.
