Client: City of Turku
Technologies: Drupal, PHP, Vue.js

City of Turku

From a pioneering website renewal to streamlining customer service

We have worked with the city of Turku since 2014. Our cooperation began with the groundbreaking Turku.fi revamp; Turku wanted to renew their web service with a multi-vendor model and chose us as one of the three companies to implement the new website. After a successful project Turku decided to present the developed platform as a shared asset which led to the creation of KADA, an open municipal web service platform.

The form of our cooperation, as well as the developers, have changed along the years and projects, but our mutual trust has stayed strong.

Thanks to our long joint history we are familiar with the city’s goals and policies in web service development, which facilitates the design and development of functional solutions. We won’t hesitate to challenge each other if our views differ – open and straightforward communication is the prerequisite for a long-term partnership.

– Thanks to our long-standing co-operation we are able to discuss matters frankly and solve potential challenges efficiently, agrees the Turku.fi implementation phase product owner Sanna Moisala.

Recently we have focused on building solutions that speed up and facilitate the work of service advisors.

Our projects

Turku.fi

We implemented the new Drupal based Turku.fi web service in cooperation with Citrus and Wunder. We pulled together to build the system, and each team audited the code written by the others. The first version of the service was published after just six months of work in 2015.

The easy-to-use web service platform is scalable, has a customizable layout, and is search engine friendly. The basis for the project was a “mobile first” mentality, so the requirements for different devices were taken into account from the get-go, and we had a big part in implementing the user interface in the early days.

Admins can easily build new themed and branded sites on top of the platform by themselves. Even though the theme for the sites is shared in parts, each site can be individualized by customizing the color theme and choosing the most suitable components available. Content can also be easily shared between sites. As a part of the project we also revamped the city’s event calendar into a regional service.

We were involved in opening up the code when the city decided to share the source code of its web service.

“Along the years we’ve benefited especially from Druid’s strong and versatile Drupal and JavaScript know-how, as well as the views of their talented specialists on solving technically complex issues.”

Mira Koivumäki-Lindholm, Web Service Specialist

The Infotori appointment system

We built a responsive and accessible appointment booking system for Infotori. Infotori is an information service for immigrants in the Turku area, where they can get assistance in their own language free of charge. Booking an appointment with Infotori was already possible but not online. This stretched the service advisors’ resources thin in relation to the amount of customers they received.

– Before, you booked an appointment with Infotori by calling the service advisors. Now that the customers can book the appointment by themselves online using their own language, the advisors have more time for actually giving advice to the customers, acknowledges planner Emmi Välke.

Customers can book a time online from among frequently asked topics. The system determines the time needed to handle the case, displays the available times, and tells the customer which documents or forms are required from them. When designing the user interface we had to take into account the requirements for different languages, and especially languages that are read right to left.

– Customers have welcomed the Infotori appointment system and the service has been found functional and user friendly. The support for multiple languages is a definite advantage, Välke continues.

We built the system on top of the Symfony framework and utilized the Vue.js library for the user interface.

Service card management application

We implemented a responsive and accessible service card management system for the use of the customer advisors. The service cards contain information about the services the city offers as well as instructions on how each service is provided.

The service cards were in separate Word documents that had to be individually opened and printed out for use. This made using them slow. By transferring them in a digital form into a management application we speeded up and facilitated the advisors’ work.

– The new service card system has been well liked and used; it is user friendly through and through and supports the advisors’ work, describes the service card product owner Jaana Sitaru-Niemi.

In the application, the user can create and edit service cards, search for them according to content, and filter the cards by topic. Service cards can also be created by pulling the information through an API from the city of Turku’s service management database. The service information pulled from the database is updated automatically in the application as it is edited in the database.

– In customer service work the most important content is the one that we input, which in this case means the individual sales advice for a service, Sitaru-Niemi continues.

We built the application with the Drupal content management system. For search feature we utilized Drupal’s Web Search API search engine and the Solr search server.

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