City of St. George + Qualtrics

St. George civic leaders wanted to strengthen trust between residents and city service providers by improving communication and service delivery. They began with an initiative focused on improving the user experience through a redesigned city website and social media storytelling, highlighting the people and work behind essential services like sewer maintenance. While those efforts made a noticeable difference, city teams wanted to go further. So St. George partnered with Qualtrics to gather valuable feedback from residents and visitors, a data-driven approach that revealed key opportunities to enhance services and better meet community needs.

St. George used Qualtrics to create a ticketing system to capture user issues related to the city’s website. The resulting feedback not only identified several issues with the website but also provided new insights into St. George’s key resident journeys that “really changed the way we’re thinking about customer service from a municipal level,” says Chad Thomas, the city’s economic development director. 

One illustrative example occurred when a city resident expressed frustration that they were unable to register online for a local pickleball tournament. The service ticket enabled city staffers to see precisely where the customer was on the city’s website when they filed the request. That made it easy to spot and resolve the problem: a graphic that appeared to link to a registration page but didn’t. 

The incident also highlighted opportunities to strengthen the city’s response process for residents seeking assistance. At times, staff members answering calls weren’t sure where to route specific requests, which occasionally led to missed follow-ups. Using insights gathered through Qualtrics, Thomas’ team was able to clearly identify where gaps existed and proactively update the city’s standard operating procedures. These improvements streamlined internal workflows, improved accountability, and ensured that resident concerns are addressed promptly and consistently moving forward.

“There were so many things that we identified as potential pitfalls for that process,” Thomas says. “That was very beneficial for us.”

The incident prompted St. George’s leaders to begin development of its first-ever cross-functional service standard, a project that’s still in progress. Among the key aims is to build accountability to close the loop on customer requests. Under St. George’s legacy process, once a staffer in one department forwards a request to a different department there’s often no follow up, allowing requests to fall through the cracks. Already, St. George used Qualtrics to implement a follow up survey that asks residents whether their issue was addressed successfully—and initiates an automated follow up process when the answer is no. 

St. George is also using Qualtrics to incorporate feedback in other ways. For example, last year it asked council members to rank their top spending priorities during their annual budget workshops and used the responses to help inform specific budget decisions.