A street lighting request, a letter to the mayor or a complaint about street cleanliness: every day, local authorities receive messages that need to be acknowledged and answered.
For municipal staff and elected officials, the challenge is to find the relevant information, route requests and track their progress, sometimes across several departments.
Available to municipalities and local authorities of all sizes from €489 per year, Digitalebox’s citizen request management solution supports public service modernization and the digital transformation of local government.
Modernizing the management of citizen requests
City Hall’s digital transformation is about more than putting services online. It also involves organizing everyday work and helping departments use shared information.
Digitalebox centralizes incoming requests and makes them easier to follow. Staff have a dedicated tool to organize requests and forward them to the relevant departments.
Whether for a municipal clerk, a senior administrator, the mayor’s office or an elected official handling resident concerns, the objective is practical: know which requests have been received, how their handling is progressing and what response to prepare.
Moving from scattered files to a shared way of working
Individual spreadsheets, paper folders, email inboxes and separate notes have often helped teams meet residents’ needs with the resources available.
But as these tools accumulate, tracking becomes harder. Information remains in an inbox, several versions of a file circulate or a staff member’s absence makes it difficult to pick up a case.
Adopting software to manage correspondence and resident concerns helps organize this work around a shared database. It supports clearer working practices and continuity in case handling.
Following citizen requests from receipt to response
When a resident reports a street lighting problem, receiving the message is only the first step. The team needs to find the relevant details, route the request to the appropriate department and follow the information needed to prepare a response.
By centralizing this information, Digitalebox helps teams maintain an overview of the case. The staff and elected officials involved can use a more organized record to coordinate their exchanges and reduce omissions.
This approach supports more consistent relationships with residents, without requiring teams to reconstruct each request from scattered documents.
Regulatory requirements also apply to residents’ data
A complaint may include contact details, an address, attachments or information about a resident’s personal circumstances.
Handling this information carries responsibilities for the local authority. For authorities subject to the GDPR, relevant obligations include identifying the data needed, who may access it and appropriate retention periods. France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, also provides guidance for local authorities. Other jurisdictions have their own applicable requirements.
Older or informal working practices do not always make these issues easy to manage. Modernizing tools is therefore also an opportunity to review how residents’ data is organized.
A tool to support your compliance efforts
Deploying Digitalebox helps place request management within a structured approach: identify the information being processed, organize how it circulates and establish the working practices expected of teams.
Implementation should be accompanied by rules suited to the local authority and the applicable legal framework, involving its data protection officer where relevant. These rules cover privacy information, access to case files, retention and archiving, including applicable public records requirements.
The software supports this work; compliance also depends on its configuration, how it is used and the local authority’s procedures.
For guidance on the French and European context, see the CNIL’s data protection principles for local authorities (in French).
Modernization accessible to local authorities of all sizes
A small municipality needs clear request tracking just as much as a local authority with several departments. Resources and structures differ, but the challenge is the same: address residents’ concerns and make work easier for staff and elected officials.
From €489 per year, Digitalebox’s citizen request management solution provides a dedicated tool to start modernizing the handling of correspondence and resident concerns.
See citizen request management in action
Would you like to organize residents’ requests more effectively and improve your local authority’s working practices?
Discover our citizen request and correspondence management software.
Book a demo with our team to discuss your organization and your needs.