Since 2008, the City of Arlington's Action Center has served residents as a non-emergency call center for questions regarding Municipal Court, Code Compliance and Animal Services. It serves as a central point of contact for key service-oriented operations. Employees work hard to resolve issues and concerns efficiently and in a timely manner.

The Action Center receives about 300,000 calls per year, but some of these calls are abandoned. An abandoned call is any call where the person hangs up before the Action Center has an opportunity to answer.

Since 2010, the Action Center has successfully lowered the Hispanic abandonment calls from 30 percent to two percent. "We didn't have enough staff answering the Spanish queue and also the Hispanic community they don't stay on hold long they hang up a lot quicker," said Gil Mesa, manager of the Action Center. "Other residents will give us a minute to a minute and twenty seconds until they hang up - and in the Spanish queue, they are hanging up within 20 seconds." Mesa says that after evaluating these factors, he decided to hire more bilingual staff and retrain his other staff to get a better understanding of the different departments that most calls come in for.

"As I hired more bilingual staff, I saw our abandon rate go down," said Mesa. "Our staff also has also become more knowledgeable on all the different queues we answer." Mesa says language was the main barrier for these abandonment rates.

"We are able to serve more of the Hispanic community today," he said. "Our call volume that are strictly bilingual is greater than our code compliance call volume."

The Action Center now has eleven staff members, four of which are bilingual.

Contact the Arlington Action Center by calling 817-459-6777 or visit them online at http://www.arlington-tx.gov/contact/.