Service Please, Ms. Stephanson: CRERAR

Published 09/14/2025 · Updated 09/14/2025

City manager Wendy Stephanson has publicly noted that service at the municipality must improve, hence the order to return to work full-time for all office staff.

While some groups at city hall have difficulty remembering they are paid to serve to the public, one group has year-after-year provided outstanding service to its customer, I’m referring to the people who work the 3-1-1 city help line.

This group receives little recognition, they’re just expected to report issues, respond to questions concerning city services, or help with service requests without any fanfare. When you call many organizations’ call centres looking for assistance, you first have battle with voice recognition software (wrongfully referred to as AI) that insists it doesn’t need to connect you to a real person because it can answer your query if you only give it a chance. I’ve given these systems the opportunity, and they don’t help. It’s refreshing that this blockade is not thrown up by city hall after dialing 3-1-1.

After listing to the “Welcome City of Ottawa” message and listening to a long list of options, most of which aren’t relevant, a caller is told to wait for the next available representative. If Stephanson wants to improve service at city hall she could begin by allowing callers to press zero immediately rather than forcing them to listen to the full introductory message. This would reduce wait times by about one minute. Anyone who wants to hear all the options can do so by not pressing zero. As the highest paid employee at city hall, Stephanson would well to attend a course in creative problem solving.

I have been calling 3-1-1 for many years and until the last few weeks have always been able to get through to a live person within two to three minutes. Last week when I called, the wait time was “approximately 31 minutes”. Is service at 3-1-1 being deliberately sabotaged to prove that all office staff are needed back at their desks? An old friend used to call this approach to proving a point a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Through it all, the people who answer the phones are always helpful. They have general knowledge in many areas so that queries are usually resolved on the first call. When the person’s knowledge level has been reached and a subject matter expert is required to help callers further, they are passed along to the department where the phone usually rings through to voicemail and the customer is told to leave a voice message containing their contact information so they can be called back within two business days.

Hah! Here’s where the rubber is going to meet the road when all staff are called back to the office in January 2026. Will someone actually pick up the phone when callers are directed to departments where the experts reside? My bet is no. If this turns out to be the case, service won’t be any better than it is now, even with everyone safe and sound in their cubicles. A message to all staff from the city manager telling them to pick up their phones when they ring would go a long way to improving service.

But wait. There’s always http://www.ottawa.ca where, theoretically, the answers to all our questions can be found. However, experience has shown that the search engine on ottawa,ca is not very helpful. One time I decided to do my search of ottawa.ca externally using Google and I found what I was looking for in about two minutes.

The next time I called 3-1-1, I mentioned this to the person who picked up the phone and they noted that people working at the help desk always search ottawa.ca externally using Google because the search engine on the city’s site isn’t helpful. So, another suggestion for the city manager, who suddenly seems concerned about service, is to invest in a better search session for ottawa.ca.

There you go city manager. No charge for my suggestions.

Howard Crerar is a project manager and has worked in the software industry for three decades.