Challenge

Residents struggled to find answers or be served in the ways that they expected, which led to more phone calls. Municipal staff were being interrupted constantly, taking focus away from the strategic work that actually serves the community. 

Michael Elm from the City Manager's Office knew this could form a vicious cycle.

When municipal staff are drowning in repetitive inquiries, Elm believes “they are surviving, not advancing.” If stretched thin for long enough, morale can drop, turnover can rise, and progress can easily halt. Elm warns that an understaffed city is going to run a risk of a workplace culture problem, noting that “whatever tools and resources we can give staff to make it easier are going to be successful in the long term." 

The Original Plan: A 24/7 Digital Assistant

Suisun City, California, partnered with Polimorphic to modernize service delivery while alleviating pressure and distraction from its lean staff. 

The plan was for Suisun City to become more of a "two-click city" with a knowledgeable AI chatbot on their website and a 24/7 voice agent to handle their main phone line. The goal was to automatically answer routine questions and seamlessly route callers to the right department. 

To make the technology approachable and official, they branded the omnichannel assistant "Susie."

A common fear among city managers and CIOs is that deploying impactful government technology will turn into a full-time job. Elm was navigating this exact pressure during Suisun City's launch.

"I was managing 25 other projects. I'm not exaggerating," Elm explained. Despite that massive workload, rolling out Polimorphic never became a bottleneck. By structuring the deployment around the reality of an understaffed city, Elm appreciated how Polimorphic’s customer success team "broke everything down into manageable steps and led us through the process." The result was a sophisticated AI assistant deployed smoothly, an experience Elm called "a breath of fresh air." 

In the first few months of being active on their main phone line, Polimorphic resolved 70% of calls. 

The 'Aha' Moment: From Tool to Safety Net

In the first weeks of having Susie live on their website and main city phone line, staff discovered a call in the logs that was quickly shared around the office. A resident had called in asking a highly complex question about salvage rights for a partially sunken vessel near the harbor.

Normally, a niche question like that triggers a disruptive game of departmental hot potato and requires staff to spend extensive time researching the answer. Instead, Polimorphic surfaced the correct answer from city resources easily. "It answered it in minutes. I probably would have spent the next hour trying to figure it out," Elm said.

That was the moment the platform stopped being just a "new tool" and started feeling like a safety net, one that resolves complex questions, softens surge days, and manages the sudden fires that small teams cannot afford. Elm captured the bigger meaning of this capability: "It became the catalyst for internal progress, a launch pad when it comes to workload reduction and customer satisfaction."

Building Internal Confidence 

That initial "safety net" feeling quickly translated into measurable, departmental wins. The AI wasn't just catching weird edge cases anymore; it was actively protecting staff focus by handling the daily grind of routine inquiries, and challenging ones too. 

Empowering the Finance Team

Seeing the platform’s results and capabilities, the finance team raised their hands for help with a daily disruption that was silently consuming 40 hours every month. Residents were calling the Finance Department trying to pay their water bills by phone. However, those phone payments are collected by a third-party vendor, meaning city staff could not process them directly. As a result, highly qualified staff were forced to act as manual switchboards just to redirect callers 40 times every day. 

Forty calls a day doesn’t just steal minutes. It steals focus. It breaks up deeper work into fragments. It forces staff to switch contexts constantly. And it creates a frustrating experience for residents too, who call one number only to be told to write down another.

Because Suisun City had already successfully implemented Polimorphic's foundational infrastructure, adding a dedicated finance line to intercept these callers required only an additional hour of work.

Solution

The Real ROI: Reclaiming 40 Hours a Month

That one hour of setup yielded massive returns. Today, the AI manages around 1,500 calls to the Finance Department monthly, successfully resolving routine issues and driving a 70% reduction in calls reaching human staff.

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What’s Next 

Suisun City is actively refining how residents interact with Susie, knowing that this kind of tool does not degrade over time; it gets sharper as the city optimizes it. "We are optimizing it continuously," Elm noted. "Polimorphic’s platform works and is a huge value add to the city, to our culture, and to our workload."

Deeper Integrations and New Horizons

Next on their horizon are deeper software integrations. The city is working to connect Polimorphic with Tyler Munis, which will allow residents to securely process water payments directly through the voice line. 

The goal remains simple: progress without burnout. Suisun City operates on the belief that every hour matters because, in Elm’s experience, “sometimes the difference between drowning and moving forward is one smart system, one focused implementation, and one hour of work in the right place.”