Name: Vicki Kinman
Email: Vicki_Kinman@dca.ca.gov
Department: Department of Consumer Affairs
Areas: Customer Service and IT
Idea/Initiative Name: Consumer Service Center (web portal) Description: A “one-source” website for consumer information to facilitate information dissemination and increase consumer awareness.
- Goal: Typical government websites are presented in a silo manner, with each department providing the services they offer. This innovative website was developed to focus on one subject, Consumer Services, and provide information across state, federal, and nonprofit organizations. The impact is that consumers nationwide will benefit from the information being provided.
- Key Performance objective met: A service-related web site that provides information from State Government, Federal Government and Non-Profit Agencies those focus on Consumer Services.
- Strategy: The Department of Consumer Affairs developed the website using a goggle appliance with a search engine that was manually indexed with the names of State, Federal and non-profit organizations that provide consumer services so all searches will lead the consumer to the organization providing the service they are searching for.
- Tactics:Research was done to identify all the web addresses that provide consumer information on a state, federal and nonprofit level. The information found was indexed to a site-specific web search tool that provides the search feature. Additional information provided on the site was obtained through various searches and by reaching out to State of California webmasters to provide their information. New information is constantly added as discovered and provided.
- Resources Needed: The website requires very little maintenance. An average of 5 PY hours per month.
- Implementation Time: 40 Hours
Results: The website is fairly new, so historical data is not yet available. However, we are confident that by having this information within one website and with the search engine index focused on consumer services, consumers will be able to obtain information much more rapidly than through a standard search engine. There have been favorable comments on the site, as well as an award from the National Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council (eC3) Board of Directors and Awards Committee in the Government Award for Transformation Using Technology.
Lessons learned: This was a very successful project. We look forward to using this technology and service concept to build other websites for California Consumers.
Related Resoures:
Consumer Service Center