Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Work Hours
Monday to Friday: 7AM - 7PM
Weekend: 10AM - 5PM
Ninety days ago we launched automatic SLA refunds: when we miss a service commitment, your fee is credited automatically, with no form to fill. Here’s what happened.
The numbers
- 1,241,062 service requests processed.
- 498 SLA misses (0.04% miss rate).
- $19,840 in automatic refunds, 100% issued within 1 business day.
- 0 residents needed to file a refund request.
What the misses had in common
Of the 498 misses, 71% came from three business-licensing flows with complex inter-agency dependencies. That’s the unsurprising part. The surprising part is that of those 71%, the median overrun was 6 hours — meaning the real cost to residents was modest, but the accountability signal was loud. Operations leadership now reviews those three flows weekly.
The accountability lever works when the refund is automatic. It stops working the moment you ask the resident to complete a form to claim it.
Felicia Mendes, Director of Resident Advocacy
What’s next
We’re extending the programme to include response-time commitments for human escalations (currently: 1 business day, committed to: 1 hour for critical categories). We will publish the first month’s results openly.