IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Northumberland County Council has saved an estimated £500,000 a year in IT costs by using customer relationship management software from Oracle.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) released 13 customer relationship management (CRM) products on 10 December 2003, four months earlier than planned, in response to fears that some local authorities are falling behind schedule in attempting to get services online by the end of 2005.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) has invited local authorities to lead the CRM National Project.

In an open letter divisional manager of local e-government at the ODPM Julian Bowrey called for expressions of interests from interested councils, either individually or collectively.

Carried out on behalf of Teasel Performance Management, the report reveals that of those that do measure customer satisfaction, in-house contact centres were much more proactive on overall assessment, with 83% sending out questionnaires; 43% calling customers at random; 43% calculating average call value; and 26% asking customers to stay on the line to complete a brief survey. The most common approach to measuring customer satisfaction (100%) was to listen to a selection of calls and make a judgement

Local authorities are under pressure from two different directions - facing demands on one side to cut costs but also to improve the service they provide to the public.

And in many cases they are expected to do this with technology many have never used before.

Councils are increasingly adopting customer relations management (CRM) models to find out exactly what customers want. But public sector CRM is developing in quite a different way to its private sector counterpart.

Almost 70 per cent of all calls received from the public are able to record details in the system and route them directly to the right member of staff for action.

The Comino system keeps citizen information from a wide range of sources in a central database. This links with Spelthorne’s online payment and facilities booking applications, providing a fully integrated, customer-focused approach. In the first full year of use, Customer Services handled almost three times as many calls, with the same number of staff and with improved response rates. Spelthorne’s community transport service, ‘Spelride’, has reduced the average number of engaged calls from over 2,000 a month to just seven, thanks to improved call routing and changed processes enabled by Comino.

The CRM programme puts the 1 million residents of Staffordshire in a unique position. Even though this type of project has been completed for various city councils, this is the first county district model to be implemented and helps to support the view of Staffordshire as being 'a leading light' with regards to the e-government agenda as laid down by Central Government.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has invited bids from councils to take over the £4.25 million Customer Relationship Management National Project.

The search is on for a new owner after the London Borough of Newham turned down the opportunity to remain as lead local authority for the project.

A modular, cloud-based system positions Colorado on the leading edge of benefits management.

Most state government health and human service agencies continue to rely on unwieldy legacy software to run their eligibility systems. Because of their complexity, updates and replacement projects often end up over budget and behind schedule. But with the encouragement of the federal government, some states have begun deploying commercial cloud platforms and a modular approach to speed up development and reduce risk.

Data from the Digital Cities and Counties Surveys reveals that governments are either investing in or planning to deploy CRM systems.

Over the last few years, the use of customer relationship management (CRM) has been ramping up in local government. The Digital Cities Survey revealed that as of last year, more than 90 percent of cities are either using or working to deploy the technology. And while it’s not quite as pervasive in counties, nearly 70 percent are doing the same, according to the 2016 Digital Counties Survey. Since the information has been tracked for cities, more than half have implemented CRM, while the numbers have been inching up for counties. As cloud computing makes the technology more easily attainable and citizens look for their governments to take a customer-driven approach to services, these numbers are expected to continue to rise.

But by deploying an off-the-shelf product with a little modification and creativity, the Commonwealth not only replaced legacy systems, "but provided a considerably enhanced user experience and workflow process in the back office that did not exist at all," Virginia CIO Sam Nixon said. Agencies have been able to speed up the delivery of citizen services, respond more quickly to inquiries and concerns, retire outdated and often unsupported software and hardware systems and redeploy existing staff to other tasks.

Every service request — by phone, mobile app or Boston’s Web portal — becomes a piece of data that can be used to track the city’s performance.

If traditional, hotline 311 calls and fully staffed call centers are financially unsustainable, then the future of customer service and CRM might be found in the city where the first mobile app was launched. Since that eventful moment, Boston has seen its digital channels grow significantly, expanding 10 percent per year for the past three years, according to CIO Jascha Franklin-Hodge. “Today, we are averaging 59 percent of our service requests through digital channels,” he said. “There’s been a dramatic move by our customers from phone to digital.”