Taipei Fine Arts Museum

The city government held a press conference to celebrate the anniversary of the refurbished 1999 Citizen Hotline on July 24 at Taipei City Hall. Noting that the hotline received over 1.75 million calls during the past year, Commissioner Emile C.J. Sheng of Taipei’s Research, Development, and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) gave himself 70 points for the policy’s implementation. He noted that there is room for improvement for the citizen hotline.
According to the call center, the 1999 Citizen Hotline received over 1.75 million calls (as of July 24), processing an average of 140,000 calls each month. The average length of each call is 2 minutes and answered within 5.35 seconds. RDEC reported that the 1999 Citizen Hotline is the most well received policy of the city government among local residents.
Mayor Hau Lung-bin said he is very pleased with the one-stop service for the city’s residents. In the past, the number 1999 is merely the number to call for city hall’s operator; however, since the implementation of the one-stop service hotline in July of 2008, the 1999 call center reported that number of calls has skyrocketed to an average of 5,000 per day.
Commissioner Sheng expressed his gratitude to the Department of Information Technology (DOIT) for its support. He noted that the software and dispatch platforms are vital to the success of the hotline. Citing New York’s 311, he noted that New York City Government invested US$25 million to build the system. Taipei City, on the other hand, spent only NT$25 million for the 1999 Citizen Hotline.
According to Sheng, the top priority of the 1999 Citizen Hotline is to handle the problem reported by the caller as the city government’s immediate problem. The success of the city’s citizen hotline convinced municipalities such as Taipei County, Miaoli County, Taichung County, Nantou County, and Kaohsiung City to establish similar one-stop service hotlines.