Hotline 1022 becoming effective bridge between authorities, residents

SGGP 05/10/2022 11:17

Formerly considered a channel for residents in Ho Chi Minh City to report problems in infrastructure, the hotline 1022 has gradually become an essential channel for the city to communicate with its citizens, especially during the fourth outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. SGGP Newspaper has conducted an interview with Director of the HCMC Information and Communications Department Lam Dinh Thang on future development plans for this hotline as the city is transforming into a smart city.

The interface of Hotline 1022 app is user-friendly to help citizens quickly send their reports to functional agencies. (Photo: SGGP)

Explaining the expansion of Hotline 1022 from a mere channel for reporting problems in infrastructure and urban order to accepting feedbacks on other issues, Director Lam Dinh Thang said that it was first expanded to receive urgent notices of all city-related matters during the fourth outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Day by day, people are used to the channel being a bridge between the municipal authorities and them.

Seeing that, the city plans to turn this hotline into a prestigious communication channel between the public and the government, as well as a tool for data analysis to serve the city governance.

There are five more minor development directions for Hotline 1022 to be:

_A multi-service and multi-utility portal, a communication portal between people and the municipal authorities in the future with the motto ‘Thousands of Information Pieces – One Connection Method’, in hope of bringing about practical benefits to residents during the transformation of HCMC into a smart city;

_A monitoring portal for the settlement of people’s feedbacks and reports, as it is now forwarding thousands of messages from the community to related state agencies for handling, under the supervision of the HCMC Home Affairs Department and direction from HCMC People’s Committee;

_A portal with flexible channels to receive information 24/7, ranging from voice mail, e-mail, website, smart device app, to social network pages (Facebook, Zalo);

_A shared portal to receive all city-related feedbacks thanks to the launch of a unified platform that shares both the infrastructure and human resources;

_A portal implementing high technologies like AI (callbot, chatbot), which is able to integrate digital maps, monitoring camera systems in order to answer questions from the public and provide necessary information when requested.

Discussing the methods to upgrade the quality of Hotline 1022, the Director shared that his Department has just piloted the function of operation directing and automatic SMS delivering for the task of handling feedbacks and suggestions from the community on Hotline 1022. This function allows the city leaders to deliver timely directions and localities to quickly submit reports to their supervisors. It can automatically deliver statistics of feedbacks of each aspect, field, locality via an SMS at 5:00 p.m. every Friday so that leaders of these fields are aware of the progress of feedback handling.

This function is expected to increase the performance of feedback or document responding in all localities. As a result, compared to the first 6 months this year, the lateness rate of addressing public feedback in the third quarter has reduced by 10 percent to 4.67 percent. The rate in September was only 1 percent.

Answering the question about the pressure of employees in Hotline 1022 headquarter when they have to receive a huge amount of information each day and the long-term possibility of gathering all feedback receiving tasks into one hotline, Director Thang stated that the problem arose because there was no clear direction and consistent organization in the whole city, plus the fact that different data of the city were not collected properly for the sake of easy analysis and evaluation.

Hotline 1022 becoming effective bridge between authorities, residents ảnh 2

Director of the HCMC Information and Communications Department Lam Dinh Thang

However, Hotline 1022 as one unified portal can help to save operation costs, reduce redundancy, ensure transparency and objectiveness in both the supervision task and feedback handling one thanks to its coherent, strong protocol.

“Hotline 1022, launched by the HCMC Department of Information and Communications, has received the participation of 86 units and 625 processing stations, which are functional agencies and the local authorities. Formerly, the city could only receive 10,000-20,000 messages from the public. In 2021, Hotline 1022 received over 2 million messages. In the first 9 months this year, there were more than 28,000 messages sent here, which are then handled and published for residents to evaluate their satisfaction level”, said Director Thang.

By Mai Hoa – Translated by Thanh Tam