Costa Mesa Sanitary District (CMSD) serves as a vital entity in providing solid waste collection and recycling, as well as wastewater collection services to the vibrant community of Costa Mesa, CA, and surrounding areas. Driven by a commitment to excellence and transparency, CMSD sought innovative solutions to enhance customer service and accessibility. This led them to partner with GOGov, leveraging the GOGov Citizen Requests/311 to streamline communication and empower residents to submit service requests effortlessly. Today, CMSD utilizes GOGov as a centralized platform to manage citizen inquiries, report issues, and track performance, revolutionizing their approach to customer service. With a focus on continuous improvement, CMSD looks to the future with plans to expand service offerings and further enhance the customer experience.

About Costa Mesa Sanitary District (CMSD)

Costa Mesa Sanitary District (CMSD) is an independent special district that provides solid waste collection and recycling and wastewater collection to a population of about 118,000 people in the city of Costa Mesa, as well as a small portion of the city of Newport Beach and unincorporated Orange County. These core responsibilities are accomplished through a combination of public and private services, which include an in-house administrative and wastewater maintenance staff and a privately contracted waste hauler, attorney, and treasurer. The services specifically cover trash collection and recycling & wastewater maintenance, which means CMSD owns the sewer system in Costa Mesa. CMSD manages wastewater collection and transmittal to a recycling facility.

In 2015, CMSD became the first agency in Southern California to launch a residential Organics Recycling Program, about 7 years ahead of a state law requiring residents and businesses to recycle organic materials.

What was the challenge that led Costa Mesa Sanitary District to GOGov?

CMSD is keen on providing excellent service and the District was looking for a way to provide more transparency, which is very important to the Board and General Manager at CMSD. The goal was to give customers every possible way to access and contact the District to let them know if there were any issues or needs. CMSD found that GOGov Citizen Requests Management was the right tool to allow the district to live up to this goal of excellence by letting customers quickly and easily submit questions and requests at any time from the CMSD website or from their smartphones.

The decision to start using GOGov stems from CMSD’s ongoing goal to leverage technology in order to improve customer service, accessibility, and transparency to their customers. CMSD wants to give each customer a variety of ways to reach them beyond traditional methods of communication like phone and email.

How is Costa Mesa Sanitary District using GOGov today?

CMSD currently uses GOGov’s Citizen Request application as a one-stop shop for customers to easily submit service requests, ask questions, find answers, and report issues. GOGov Citizen Requests Management/311 gets the citizen request routed efficiently to whoever it needs to go to, whether its CMSD staff or outside contractors they work with. It keeps workers accountable and makes sure the issues are taken care of.

“It’s been an invaluable tool for our staff to track and follow through with requests, as well as view performance and customer satisfaction trends over time.” -Gina Terraneo, Management Analyst II

According to Gina, GOGov has been a true game changer for tracking and addressing CMSD’s trash-related service requests and reported issues. Before GOGov, CMSD’s administrative staff spent a significant amount of time answering customer phone calls and relaying requests and issues to their contracted waste hauler, CR&R. These types of requests and issues include scheduling large item and household hazardous waste pickups, requesting additional trash carts, and reporting issues like missed pickups, scavenging, and trash carts left in public view.

CMSD sought to reduce the amount of staff time spent collecting and routing these requests to CR&R, as well as obtain a mechanism to track the completion of these tasks and gauge satisfaction with customer service.

“Oftentimes we would get customer service calls to our office. Someone would take the call, write down the information and then call or e-mail the waste hauler to give them the request. So, it was very much like playing telephone. This allowed us to just have somebody put in the request online.” – Gina Terraneo, Management Analyst II

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Future Plans for Costa Mesa Sanitary District

CMSD will be transitioning from their current two-cart residential recycling/collection system to a 3-cart system in order to comply with State Senate Bill (SB) 1383. As part of this effort, the staff is using GOGov to provide customers with the following customer service opportunities:

• Requesting alternative cart sizes and additional carts

• Submitting waste disposal questions (Unsure of how to dispose of something? Ask CMSD!)

• Anonymously reporting improper use of Organics Recycling Carts

Advice for those considering GOGov

GOGov is a useful and cost-effective tool for improving customer service and accessibility for your constituents. It has multiple benefits of providing customers with an easy way to reach you for any needs they may have, saving staff time by allowing you to route requests and issues directly to the appropriate people (including both internal staff and external/contracted resources), increasing accountability by tracking staff’s effectiveness, and providing valuable reporting mechanisms to share with executive staff, elected officials, and the public.

“As someone who has worked closely with GOGov staff over many years now, I want to say that I appreciate GOGov staff’s quick responsiveness and helpfulness. I typically receive responses in less than a few hours whenever I have questions or requests. Additionally, GOGov has been proactive in creating individualized social media content to help CMSD advertise our web and mobile app, which was totally unexpected but much appreciated! The graphics were well-designed and easily updatable. Our staff loves the extra effort!” -Gina Terraneo, Management Analyst II

Your Municipality Powered by GOGov

GOGov is committed to helping municipalities and local governments enhance community engagement, streamline operations, and foster transparent communication. Our partnership with Costa Mesa Sanitary District demonstrates the potential of our solutions to make a meaningful impact on cities of all sizes, and our continued efforts to improve and innovate further.  

GOGov specializes in providing CRM, Code Enforcement, Citizen Notifications, Online Permitting and mobile software to local governments of all sizes. We built our software from the ground up working with the departments and staff that now use our products every single day.

Interested in learning more? Sign up for a demo with the GOGov team today.

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