Police CRM needs to be standardised

The UK's 45 police forces should standardise their contact centre models, according to a report from the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA).

The NPIA, which is responsible for rolling out technology to support the UK's forces, recommended that forces consider a national standard call centre model after concluding that police forces have not reaped the benefits of using standard technology in their contact centres. "Standardisation is a hugely good idea, because if you buy lots of different technology across more than 40 police forces you have to re-invent the wheel more than 40 times, which takes money away from front-line services," said Andrew Watson, CIO at British Transport Police.

According to the report 50% of police forces have integrated computing and telephony. A total of 23% use CRM with 27% planning to use it in the future. "The NPIA should work with Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to revisit the potential for a national contact management technology system," said the NPIA report. "In the absence of such a system, ACPO and NPIA should ensure that a set of agreed system capability standards are developed to help assist in force procurement decisions."

Superintendent Peter Major, NPIA's project leader on the contact management programme, said: "This benchmarking exercise allows the police service to confidently quantify and identify where performance has been good, allowing this to be shared between forces and it also highlights where improvement is required."

The NPIA is charged with taking control of national IT strategy in the police forces, effectively absorbing the operations of the Police IT Organisation (Pito).