Inside a small office in the back corner of City Hall sits the heart of Watertown’s 311 Service Center. The two-woman operation fields calls, texts, emails, and other messages about potholes, people trying to reach a City employee, and occasionally to report something strange they have just witnessed.
The system is called 311 because that is the number people can call from within the City limits. In late 2023, Laura Murray came in as Constituent Services Director to turn the old See-Click-Fix program into a one-stop customer services center for residents, businesses, and others.
“We want to be as available as possible to people,” Murray said. “We want more people to be utilizing us as well. Everything should be coming through us, whether you think you know who you need to talk to or not, we’ll make sure you get to the right place.”
Sitting at her desk, Murray can scan the multiple computer screens to look at calls, texts, emails that she or Constituent Service Representative Stephanie Owens fielded. She also has access to statistics about how many of each came in.
Springtime tends to be quieter than other times of year, Owens said.
“I would say right now the tree inspections and tree plantings are probably our biggest ones, because in the spring season they’re planting all the new trees,” Owens said. “So that’s probably the most frequent used right now.”
The past winter provided some busy days for the 311 Center, Murray said.
“On Jan. 27 we had 125 calls and texts, and on Feb. 24 we had 112 calls, so that was busy,” Murray said. “Our average, I would say, is about 60 per day on a normal day.”
A lot of the calls that came in during the two storms were for sidewalks not being shoveled.
“This was the first year we started fining, but we only have two enforcement officers, so it was kind of tough to keep up with,” Murray said.
This summer, Murray expects the calls to increase heading into summer.
“Once all of the street construction starts at once it will get a lot busier,” Murray said. “We’re gonna have a lot of construction happening at once. We’re redoing 25 streets this summer.”
A recently added feature, texting, has been a popular one, Murray said.
“People love it for pictures. It’s so easy for them to take a picture of a pothole, and then just immediately text it to us, instead of having to go through the 311 (website),” Murray said. “We get a lot of illegal dumping pictures and pothole pictures.”
Taking Calls
Phone calls remain a key feature for the 311 Service Center.
“Thank you for calling the City of Watertown. This is Stephanie. How can I help you?” Owens as she answers a call. She joined the team in March 2024, and talked about the favorite part of her job.
“I think the connection with the residents. I get to speak to so many residents, especially the seniors. They love calling over here, and I feel like sometimes they call just to have a conversation. They just want someone to talk to,” Owen said. “But just being able to work with all of them, everybody in the city, the businesses, they call a lot. Especially for me, just because I’ve worked with the community so much here, just makes it so much easier to reach out to them.”
Some people know Owens from her roles as coach of the Watertown High School Cheerleading program.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Wait, is this Coach Steph from Watertown?’, and I say ‘Yeah,'” Owens said.
Owens and Murray never know what they will be asked, and they have received some unusual calls.
Earlier this year the 311 Center was alerted about something strange spotted by a resident in the Mount Auburn Catholic Cemetery, a place where there had been no burials since the early 1900s.
“She was walking the cemetery, and there were literal bones dug up,” Murray said. “So I ended up calling the police. It looked like a freshly dug grave.”
The bones ended up being those of an animal, Watertown Police said, likely dug up by a coyote.
Owens also had a memorable interaction.
“So we got a call from a guy who was sitting in the parking lot at Best Buy,” Owens recalled. “First thing he said was, ‘I’m not lying,’ like, ‘This isn’t a prank, this is actually happening.’ He said that somebody’s walking down Arsenal Street with a parking meter over his shoulder.”
“I was like, ‘What do you mean?'” she said.
The man described it as a full parking meter that used to be in the sidewalk, and he was walking around with it propped up on one shoulder.
“So we had to call dispatch,” Owen said. “I was laughing so hard that (Murray) actually had to call 911 dispatch.”
When the dispatcher asked for a description, Murray said she also began laughing.
“Just picturing it in my mind, I had to take a lap because I couldn’t stop laughing,” she said.
Police searched the area but could not locate a man with a meter, and none were missing in Watertown, Murray said.
The system used by the 311 Center takes calls through the City’s computer system. This allows the calls to be transcribed by AI to create a call summary.
“After a call it gives you a summary of what the call was about,” Owens said. “Say they said something I completely forgot about, we have the option of going back and then pulling up the call and reading through it.”
The system also gives them a quick way to look up extensions of City departments and employees, Owens said. It will also keep track of which city employee or department they referred a request or question.
Because the calls are through the computer network, Murray and Owens don’t even have to be at their desk to field calls and texts.
“(Owens) was home during the snow days. I live (nearby) so I was here normally, but yeah, we can work from anywhere,” Murray said. “So all of the calls are through our system on our computer. So, as long as we have Wi-Fi, we can take calls from anywhere.”
Murray stayed up overnight during the first big storm to see how many calls came in. Few did, but it is an option in the future.
The 311 Center also has an option for people who don’t speak English. The City works with LanguageLine, which can get a translator for any language in about 30 seconds.
“They’ll ask for a translator, and all they have to tell us is the language they need it for, and we put them on hold, call the LanguageLine, and then connect the call,” Murray said. “Honestly, I love it. I love when we use it. I’ve gotten to use it in person, where we put them on speaker, and it’s really nice, and you can tell they feel more comfortable.”
Adding More Features
The 311 Service Center is staffed Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. (and until 7 p.m. on Tuesdays). The City wants people to be able to respond to residents’ questions or take reports 24/7.
Currently people can use the Report It feature. Murray would like to add an online chat feature to help people find answers to their questions.
“The next step would be a chatbot that will be on the website,” Murray said.
The system used by the City to take calls, texts and email messages has a chatbot feature, but Murray is not satisfied with it.
“Essentially, what I want a chat bot to do is scrub the website for all the information that it has and use that to answer questions,” Murray said.
She is always looking for ways the 311 Service Center can better assist the public.
“We want to be as available as possible to people,” Murray said. “We want more people to be utilizing us as well, so we really want to focus on that.”
Find out more about the 311 Service Center at https://www.watertown-ma.gov/1326/311-Service-Center