CRM in Practice: South Gloucestershire Council

South Gloucestershire Council (SGC) provides services for more than 250,000 residents, in an area combining densely-populated towns and rural settlements. The region is recognised as being the fastest growing area in South West of England.

Like every other local authority SGC is responding to central government's core policies when delivering services which included a focus on shared services and a unified view of citizens' needs provided by a streamlined, integrated solution for customer-services requirements.

Making it easy for citizens and businesses to interact with a council is of primary importance. "The Council delivers a wide range of services ranging from education and social services to planning and highways," says Caron Bentley, CRM Project Manager for SGC. "Residents need to access these services easily and in a variety of ways."

SGC had operated a bespoke CRM system, which evolved over four years. This had been developed in-house. Bentley says that this in-house offering actually represented thought leadership that was ahead of the market place at the time.

"Our business needs and budget could not be met by any solutions on the market at that time, so we developed our own system, the Customer Tracking System (CTS)," she recalls. "Over the years, we further developed and refined CTS to the point where its functionality and capacity were pushed to the limit."

This in-house knowledge was honed to such a degree that by the time the council decided it was time to go out to the market to seek a replacement the authority had a better understanding of the abilities and limitations of the off-the-shelf packaged offerings available.

"We were acutely aware of each candidate CRM system's strengths and weaknesses, and had high expectations from any 'next-level' solution in terms of integration with current business systems' architecture and future customisation," recalls Bentley.

"As mature users of CRM, we needed a low-cost system, but wanted the features you’d expect in a high level, feature-rich solution: improved workflow, integration with online forms, communication, and data delivery.”

In fact the council found that it had to go back to the marketplace several times as the CRM packages that were available were found to be too inflexible to replicate the functionality of the in-house system. There was also the issue that the council budget did not stretch to the prohibitive costs of many of the main packages.

The council eventually evaluated Microsoft CRM 1.2 for Local Government in early 2005. The council had already moved to an architecture comprising Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communications and collaboration server.

Microsoft partner Aspective showed the council how Microsoft CRM could potentially integrate with its existing systems and provide a stable and flexible environment for future systems' development including integration, including integration of Back Office systems.

The council was careful to ensure that the new system did not alienate employees used to the in-house system. "Our customer services employees were vital in helping us develop the user-focused elements of our original CTS solution, so they were quite clear about what they wanted from future systems," says Bentley. "We needed systems that would not require copious additional training for them to work effectively."

Three specific council service areas were chosen to initiate the Microsoft CRM solution, to provide a 360-degree view of customer contact These were the Planning, Transport and Strategic Environment (PTSE) contact centre, the Street Care contact centre, and the council's One-Stop Shops, which provide in person access to all of the council’s services including housing, revenue and benefits, leisure and libraries.

Aspective team developed a case-handling system which routes queries to back-office personnel and enables cases to be updated or closed within CRM. Using data migrated from the Local Land and Property Gazetteer, Aspective was able to populate the system with accurate address information. This data was then cross-referencedwith customer service requests to build a more detailed understanding the council’s interactions with residents.

The result was that residents could visit or phone the council offices and ask for an update on a previously logged issue, such as a Planning Enquiry. With Microsoft CRM, and the unique case identifier, employees can quickly retrieve information about the case. Service Requests entered through web forms can also be routed into the CRM system.

The implementation of Microsoft CRM took six months. After initial consultation, through customisation and a six-week rollout, the system went live in November 2005. This included migration of address data and focused testing and training.

Central Government's national programmes have been an incentive to investement in new information technology, including the National CRM Programme which was driven out of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The success or otherwise of these programmes is open to some debate.

"My personal view would be that all councils deployed CRM differently according to edict," says Bentley. "There were a number of suppliers that probably managed to maximise on the government edict. Perhaps if there was a more co-ordinated approach to systems, we’d have had more purchasing power and greater co-ordination among councils. Each council’s business processes are different, but locally we share a number of initiatives, concepts and how we approach them."

Bentley is also aware of the differences – and similarities – between public and private sector CRM. "I come from a private sector background so I’ve used CRM and delivered CRM in both private and public sector environments. There are differences. In the private sector, it’s all about driving sales, but it’s also about understanding the marketplace so there is similarity there. In any CRM system, its power lies in the information that is contained in it."

"A lot of councils have come down to look at our contact centre and CRM. A lot of htem have been surprised that we go down to case level detail as a lot of them only go down to top level detail. Some councils have what I’d call ‘thin CRM’ in place and it will take them longer to maximise the change that CRM can make. In terms of ROI, because we had an existing system in place, much of the benefit had come through the initial deployment and development of CTS. The full ROI will come through efficiency savings. The benefit for us is having a stable platform."