You know that feeling when you hear the street sweeper coming down the street and you make a beeline to move your car? - but alas you’re too late and now you’ve got another ticket to add to your collection of four! Of course you do!
How are you going to pay off all those tickets?
Have you ever heard of a payment plan?
In the most common purchasing scenario, you as a user make a lump sum payment in exchange for a product or service. In a flexible payment scenario, you are provided with a payment plan option that allows you to break down that lump sum amount into installment payments that can be made over a period of time. The purpose of a payment plan is to make purchases more affordable by accounting for financial or budgetary constraints with the added bonus of allowing you to grow your savings and catch up on debt.
But real talk. It’s a way for us residents that park in the wrong zone to squeeze in a quick errand to avoid depleting our bank balance.
In the City of Syracuse case, it doesn’t stop at parking tickets, we offer our residents payment plans across various services including water bills and property taxes. But the parking payment plan highlights a key point of difference in this type of monthly installment payment from others (eg. payment loan). Where we offer residents an interest-free payment option to pay off outstanding payments owed to the City on parking violations. Here choosing a payment plan might appear to be the more financially lucrative option as no additional interest is being accrued on your total balance owed.
Payment Plan Challenges:
However, the existing parking payment plans that the City offers have numerous barriers to enrollment and compliance:
Residents are required to make a sizable downpayment at the time of enrollment which can deter them from choosing to enroll despite financial benefits.
There is no standard process in place for residents to enroll in a payment plan or track payments owed
Residents are not provided with a payment schedule, payment notification options, or late payment notices making it easier for them to miss payment due dates. That coupled with the “One Strike Policy” the City currently enforces (where missing one monthly installment payment results in the resident being pulled out of their payment plan) is financially detrimental as the resident now begins to accrue more debt with additional fees and fines being added to their outstanding balance. This defeats the purpose of a payment plan being affordable and fair.
Payment plans are not advertised by the City and residents are unaware that a payment plan option is available to them. Residents do not have the option to enroll in the process online as the process is paper-based. Enrollment usually happens in person upon inquiry by the resident (usually when the resident is making a payment at the City Payment Center and finds it difficult to pay the full balance on an outstanding parking ticket).
Eligibility and documentation requirements are not available online for residents to be better informed and prepared to enroll.
Payment Plan Opportunities
In 2021, The Office of Accountability, Performance and Innovation was approached by the Department of Finance to help standardize its existing payment plan process. Collaboratively we identified process improvements needed to make it easier for residents to navigate. These changes were categorized into three main buckets: Policy, Process, and Tools.
Parking Payment Plan Service Goals:
Our first step was to take a real hard look at our existing parking payment plan service and identify challenges our residents face in navigating it and opportunities for growth within the process city departments could expand on.
To ensure our ideas worked when applied, we turned to Service Design tools to design, test, and revise the recommended process changes with city employees and residents incorporating their feedback and making changes as we continued to improve the parking payment plan service.
Introducing the first Service Design tool we used: A Service Blueprint
What is a service blueprint?
A service blueprint is a tool that allows you to visualize a service experience by mapping the step-by-step customer journey and corresponding employee and technological actions needed to facilitate that step in the process. This is a tool best used during the “development” phase of a project as it allows you to refine the intended process by identifying high-impact barriers to service delivery.
Why did we use a service blueprint for parking payment plans?
We realized quickly that providing residents with a Parking payment plans service involved collaboration between multiple departments and interdependent support processes. We needed to understand all the inner workings and interactions involved to make this process a well-oiled machine.
Specifically, we used the service blueprint to:
“See” the entire service ecosystem - identify parts of the process we do know and parts of the process that need more refining
Reduce the complexity in the parking payment plan process by breaking the process down into resident and employee actions across departments
Align and prioritize interactions across departments to increase process efficiencies i.e. illustrate key interdependencies, technological and resource constraints, and blocked information flows across departments
Identify problems (barriers and hurdles) experienced by residents in consuming the service
Identify problems (barriers and hurdles) experienced by employees in delivering the service
Identify the most appropriate service to prototype and pilot with residents and employees
Working with the right stakeholders:
The existing parking payment plan service is managed and run by the City Payments Center (CPC) operated under the Department of Finance. With new leadership and enhanced capabilities, the Parking Violations Bureau (PVB) was chosen to manage and run the new payment plan process.
We worked closely with the PVB and the CPC to map out the existing processes and envision what an “ideal” scenario looks like. Working with city cashiers, clerks and managers allowed us to design at the “frontlines”. Where we incorporated the expertise that these city employees have collected over years of navigating this complex system as recommendations.
City Payments Center: As owners of the current process the CPC is the most knowledgeable subject matter experts on the issues currently being faced by residents who are enrolled in a payment plan as well as technological and resource constraints experienced by cashiers.
Parking Violations Bureau: As owners of the new process it was key for us to understand the new process the PVB intended to execute to ensure they properly incorporate the identified policy, process, and tools recommendations while successfully overcoming the hurdles experienced by the CPC in implementation of the process.
Process mapping with the CPC
Service Blueprint Outcomes:
Service Blueprint (intake, approval process)
Working through the service blueprint with the CPC and PVB allowed us to:
Generate a set of key process, policy and tool decisions that our stakeholders would need to resolve to execute the process as intended.
Identify “gray areas” in the process i.e. parts of the process that require deeper exploration in order for us to collect enough information to better inform the intended process changes.
Eg. We worked with our partners and software vendors to understand the current capabilities of the existing technology being used. Identifying parts of the process that could be successfully digitized and automated. This approach of leveraging our existing software successfully reduced the administrative burden while avoiding long procurement processes. Overall aligning our needs for the process to our existing resources.
Identify the high impact and high priority legal, technological and resource constraints that need to be resolved in order to implement the desired process changes.
Eg. We worked closely with the Department of Law to ensure our eligibility requirements met state requirements in being affordable and fair. We eliminated the initial down payment and one-strike default policy, pivoting our official procedures to the NY state requirements of 3 months of missed payments till collections.
Resolve process redundancies using a user centered approach:
Eg. Behavioral nudges such as payment reminders are the best practice in achieving positive outcomes which in this case would be facilitating residents to pay in a timely manner and stay enrolled. Following the “resident” experience helped us understand where comprehensive information could be provided in the form of checklists and factsheets to eliminate additional steps taken by the resident to gather documentation and set expectations throughout enrollment.
Most importantly the Service Blueprint allowed our stakeholders to align on parking payment plan service goals and execution strategies. Giving departments a platform to voice their concerns, make adjustments to and take ownership of the new process while allowing residents to have a say in how they’d like things done.
Would you like to read more on how we incorporated resident feedback into our process changes? Stay tuned for part 2 on Service Design in Local Government: Parking Payment Plans, where we will take a deeper look into prototyping and testing our new parking payment plan service with residents and city employees.