Answering service for Town of Bruderheim
Posted By Walter Schneider On July 8, 2010 @ 10:12 am In Town of Bruderheim, Taxes, Organizational News, Community & Industry | 3 Comments
The Town of Bruderheim has a telephone answering service. The answering service, accessible 24/7, is staffed by two involuntary volunteers and provides redirection to intended clients for the Town Office, cheerfully and always ready to serve.
The Bruderheim Town Office is aware of that going on, and has been aware for quite some time, but so far have offered no solution to what is truly an imposition on the involuntary volunteers saddled with the task of providing service to prospective Town Office clients who ask for all sort of things, such as whether we can provide “contact details for Bruce Trucking” or whether we “still operate the bulk-water-terminal.”
The more bizarre such information requests appear to be, the more likely it is that a given party making it is simply looking for the Bruderheim Town Office.
How can it possibly be that our telephone number became the tool whereby Town Office clients find their way to constructive and accurate information offered by office staff paid to provide it, whereas we, my wife and I, get paid sweet tweet, for being always cheerful and eager to provide friendly service to all sort of calls that number anywhere between one and up to five or more a day? Our telephone number is not even remotely similar to the telephone number used by the Bruderheim Town Office (whose number is 780.796.3731).
For many years, the website of the Town of Bruderheim seriously ailed. It contained, for example, links that ostensibly were to lead to information on current town council members but led instead to a welcoming message by a now former mayor, even long after that mayor had become history for more than a year. On the other hand, the promised information about the composition of the Bruderheim Town Council remained successfully hidden from all comers.
Still, anyone sufficiently astute in using Internet searches for specific websites and willing to spend the time required to find information on the Town Council’s composition could find it, but relatively few people are that astute.
The Town Office has been aware for years that the glaring deficiencies of its website existed. Their solution was to hire someone to redesign their website, while the redesigning did nothing to address those deficiencies.
Even after the much-advertised redesigning of their website, the website still showed, for example, a member of the Town Council who years ago had left the Council because he had intended to move away, Marcel Mann. That was until about half a year ago.
About half a year ago or earlier, the Town Office deigned to announce the launching of another revamping of their website. They got everyone’s attention by removing all of their web pages and [1] replacing them with a web page that states:
 |
Town of Bruderheim |
This site is down for maintenance.
|
That is where things remain as of now. What you see there is all that remains of the consequences of the last major redesign of the website of the Town of Bruderheim. Of course, the creation of absence of useful information is an unsatisfactory problem solution. As you can see from the full text of that web page, the information provided there is useless for anyone trying to glean something as simple as instructions on how the Bruderheim Town Office can be contacted either by e-mail, snail-mail or telephone.
The reason why we have been forced into providing answering services for the Town Office is that prospective clients keep on searching for better information than that offered by the Bruderheim Town Office. All who succeed in that effort are then rewarded by reaching the best possible alternative, the website of [2] About Bruderheim, where they can obtain our telephone number, call us and get helpful advice, such as to call 780.796.3731 during standard government-bureaucracy operating hours from 9 a.m to 4 p.m.
When we paid our increased property taxes last June, we suggested to the Town Office staff that it would be a practical solution to add contact information to their cryptic message at their website, but other than that they verified that such information was absent from their website and that they told us that we would probably be very interested in “the roll-out of the newly redesigned Town Office website at their next Town Council meeting,” absolutely nothing was done to improve the quality of the service they provide to their clients. They persist in hiding their identity and location, even though the required update of their website would not require more than a few seconds of work.
Sorry people, but that is not good enough, not for as long as Town Office staff feel that a “roll-out” is as or more important than a practical and useful update of the Town Office website and to put it online for all to see and use. The general public and your constituents expect nothing less!
3 Comments To "Answering service for Town of Bruderheim"
#1 Comment By admin On July 8, 2010 @ July 8, 2010
Here is the web page of the Town of Bruderheim’s website for the “Council” information, as it existed as of September 27, 2007:
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20100708211242/http://www.bruderheim.ca/towncouncil.htm
And here is the page that got substituted for that web page sometime on or prior to April 11, 2008:
That change happened more than two years ago.
The Town Office and the Town Council may truly be concerned about promoting the fine features of our town, but they are curiously unhurried in putting their mouth where our money is.
#2 Comment By admin On July 19, 2010 @ July 19, 2010
Pat wrote 2010 07 18:
“I found your perspective illuminating and interesting. I also recently tried to go to the actual Town of Bruderheim website to look up a specific bylaw and lo and behold, no website active - it’s “down for maintenance” which means somebody has dropped the ball and isn’t looking after it properly as it has been “down for maintenance” for months. I know, because the company who did look after hosting the Town website has been dropped due to either inexperience or ineptness on the part of whomever was looking after the website at the time. It’s sad that the Town is okay with this.
Not much has changed since your notes in 2005 - 2007.
I just wanted to add my 2 bits.”
Pat, Thanks for your comment.
You are quite likely correct; ineptness or inexperience may well be the reason for not having the Town Office’s website in operation. No-one in the Town Office or Council tells me those things. They just tell me that they have their own way of doing things and that things will be better in short order, that is, within four weeks or so, counting from whenever they state that. The hard and cold reality is that nothing changes.
* When I offered my services (free of charge) for training someone in the Town Office to acquire the necessary skills for operating and maintaining their website, I was told: “That’s not how we operate.” The help I had offered would have required no more than few hours of work. For me it would have been a labour of love. Moreover, I would always have been available to help whenever help would have been asked for. Constructive and effective help would consist of nothing more than instructions on how to do specific tasks for website maintenance. In other words and to put it simply, the instructions required are nothing more than to instruct Town Office staff to run through and understand the tutorial of their web-editing software and get them to understand the options in the pull-down menus for their web-editing software.
* Due diligence and proper work ethics are matters that I cannot instill. Those are things that the Town-office manager and the Town Council must create and monitor. That is their duty.
* Their website has been completely out-of-service for about two years now. Obviously, rather than to do things right, their way to operate a website is not to have one at all. In other words, their management principle to that extent is that ignorance is bliss and that if they ignore a problem long enough it will go away.
* There are millions of kids all over the world who have no problems with running websites. Maybe it would be a good idea for the Town of Bruderheim to hire one of them instead of staff unwilling and incapable to do what needs to be done.
* The best intentions of a contractor to that extent will not come to fruition if the staff responsible for running the website is not willing to do what needs to be done. To then lay the blame for the Town Office staff’s failure on the contractor or consultant is patently unfair and grossly wrong.
* Building and maintaining a website poses no greater degree of technical difficulty or skill requirements than does running MSWord or any other word processor for creating and maintaining a set of interrelated documents. Web-editing software is nothing more than a specially-designed software package that is in effect a word processor that makes it easy for anyone to do bookmarking, linking to bookmarks and filing of documents on specific Internet sites for public access.
One of the first web-editing software packages published by Microsoft (it was available as a free download when Windows 3.1 came on the market) was called Internet Assistant. It was an add-on package for Microsoft Word.
Ignorance is not a valid excuse for failure to achieve, but it is the only plausible cause for the long-standing absence of the Town Office’s website.
Considering the never-changing explanation that the website is being re-designed and will be much better than before leaves me to contemplate Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
All the best,
Walter Schneider
#3 Comment By Walter Schneider On October 4, 2010 @ October 4, 2010
After about three years of being out of order and following numerous announcements over time that the Bruderheim Town Office’s website would be back in operation “soon” or “within about four weeks from now,” [5] the Town Office’s new website is finally in operation again.
The website looks good and is user-friendly. It will most certainly attract visitors to Bruderheim and new residents for our town.
Article printed from Lamont County Environment: http://lce.folc.ca
URL to article: http://lce.folc.ca/2010/07/08/answering-service-for-town-of-bruderheim/
URLs in this post:
[1] replacing them with a web page: http://bruderheim.ca/under-construction.aspx
[2] About Bruderheim: http://www.bruderheim.org/
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20100708211242/http://www.bruderheim.ca/towncouncil.htm: http://web.archive.org/web/20100708211242/http://www.bruderheim.ca/towncouncil.htm
[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20080330081547/http://www.bruderheim.ca/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=: http://web.archive.org/web/20080330081547/http://www.bruderheim.ca/cms/index.php?option=com_content&
#038;task=view&id=21&Itemid=
[5] the Town Office’s new website: http://bruderheim.ca
Click here to print.