CRM for the Public Sector

The acronym “CRM” takes on a new meaning when applied to the public sector - citizen relationship management.

CRM is already well established in the private sector as a means of managing a company's contact with its customers. Now the public sector is drawing on this experience to help manage its own interactions. With hundreds of different services and a much wider “customer” base it is the ability and flexibility of CRM systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, to simplify and streamline the management process of providing an array of services to a multi-faceted audience that give CRM its greatest strength.

Prior to 2004 a survey was carried out for the CRM National Programme, a government-funded body set up to promote best practice in CRM in local government. According to this survey around 170 of the 388 local authorities in England were implementing some form of CRM, and between 110 and 120 of them had aspects of the system up and running.

The adoption of CRM is central to the whole drive to improve council services and one of the lessons learnt from CRM in the private sector was that "big bang" implementations could be extremely problematic. As a result, many local authorities prefer a step-by-step approach and recognise the need to give staff a sense of what CRM means for them by introducing the tools gradually. Staff must first envision how powerful CRM can be and once that initial barrier of scepticism has been overcome, they will start seeing and reaping the benefits. Particular advantages of Microsoft Dynamics CRM are its quick user adoption through a familiar graphical user interface and deep integration with Microsoft Office Excel and Word as well as its ability to provide fast insight into critical performance management data.

Leading local authorities are learning to adopt one of two basic models in implementing CRM: a broad and thin, or a narrow and deep approach.

With the former approach, a contact centre provides a single point of access for citizens and businesses to connect to all the services that the local authority provides. By analysing all contacts, authorities can find out what kind of queries they are getting and allocate resources accordingly. This also helps them to determine in which order services should be integrated into the CRM system.

In the latter model, local authorities start with a narrow range of services, and expand one by one as each process is re-engineered. There are some fast returns here. For example, by connecting the refuse collection contractor to the CRM system, London Borough of Tower Hamlets increased the volume of special collections by 20 per cent (figure quoted as of March 2004). The net results of providing a speedier citizen response and being able to plan refuse removals, are reduced costs and less dumping and fly-tipping on the streets.

Since beginning the Tower Hamlets CRM project, the number of people who say they are satisfied with council services has risen considerably, and Tower Hamlets is now among the top performing councils in terms of customer satisfaction. Another early CRM adopter, Salford City Council, now boasts 94 per cent customer satisfaction ratings.

Since this report was published, NDL-Metascybe have undertaken three consecutive surveys. They started out in 2004 to coincide with the imposition of e-Government targets by the central government on local authorities. These targets included the adoption of CRM technologies. In 2004 there was a considerable degree of confusion over expectations of a CRM system: what it entailed and what benefits or savings could be derived. Three years later NDL-Metascybe perceived an entirely different landscape with nearly 66% of authorities having a live CRM system and a further 14% in the middle of implementation cycles.

The findings of their latest survey across 258 different councils, conducted and published in collaboration with Computing magazine, are considerably more encouraging. About 77% of authorities now recognise the potential savings to be made from introducing CRM technologies and only a minority (11%) feels that they have had a poor CRM implementation experience.

However, there are still some key issues outstanding: lack of focus on quantifiable savings of a CRM implementation and too shallow an integration of a CRM system into other business processes. For example, NDL-Metascybe report that only 19 of some 199 authorities could offer even a vague value for how much they might have saved. Also, for the public sector, where the range of services is very diverse and there is the task of updating legacy systems and processes, it is all the more important that they focus on an integration with back office systems. Again, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, by offering effective integration with the Microsoft Dynamics range of ERP products (notably Dynamics GP), which include advanced reporting and business intelligence tools, can really assist in streamlining and integrating processes, reducing paperwork systems, identifying fiscal targets and measuring savings.