Customer relationship management software is revolutionising the
operations of one city council, transforming both staff attitudes
and office ambience, says Lindsay Nicolle
There's something strange going on in local government up and
down the country. In town halls and benefits offices across the
land, old dingy consulting rooms supporting outmoded working
practices are being transformed into bright and friendly customer
service centres, with streamlined administration made
super-efficient with the help of computers.
But the most startling change, it has to be said, is in the
attitude of the staff who work for these much-maligned
institutions. Counter clerks in benefits offices no longer seem
bored and frustrated with their lot, unable or unwilling to answer
customer queries. Today, staff are quick off the mark to "own" your
problem and resolve it as fast as possible, no matter how much
inconvenience this causes. And, what's more, they succeed in doing
so - something that just a couple of years ago even the most
optimistic local government official would not have gone on record
to guarantee.
The catalyst for this rebirth of local government has been a
willingness to spend money on information technology systems that
enable every local citizen to be treated as a much-valued customer.
The technology sitting at the heart of this initiative is customer
relationship management (CRM) software.
Does all this sound too good to be true? Well it is - but not
for long. Local government is getting its act together and dragging
itself and its staff into the digital age in recognition that
customer service is key, but it will take a while before the word
spreads across the UK.
Meanwhile, there are shining examples of how to get it right,
for example, Leeds City Council, which serves 725,000 people and is
the second largest council in England and Wales with a budget of
over £100m.
Big user
IT infrastructure-wise, Leeds can be classified as a big user,
running around 6,000 networked PCs, 130 to 140 Compaq, NT and
Novell servers, and some mainframe and Unix boxes. The council also
hosts a Web site, that has been recognised for being one of the
best produced by a local government authority in the UK.
With so much to live up to, Leeds has become the first council
in the UK to roll out CRM software, worth £500,000, across its
organisation. The move to embrace CRM began three years ago as part
of a wider £8m city regeneration scheme designed to redevelop
customer services to enable the council to get more in touch with
local citizens. The whole underpins the city's "Vision for Leeds",
which puts the focus on the citizen.
The CRM software, which is being deployed this month, will allow
Leeds Council staff to seamlessly deal with citizens' queries
across many departments - from housing, benefits and social
services to GP surgeries. It will streamline and improve the
handling of queries from telephone callers ringing the new call
centre or visitors calling in at one of the 12 physical customer
service points situated in the more deprived areas of Leeds and
called One-Stops - as in one-stop shop for all your needs.
The council reckons that it will take a year to roll out the CRM
software to all its customer service centres, but, eventually, the
new system will dovetail into an intranet-based customer service
knowledge management system previously developed to provide a
complete customer-centric council service.
Multiskilled teams
The long-term aim is to create integrated systems that will
support the rapid development of multiskilled council teams so that
customer services staff can deliver a wider range of social
services more effectively. In time, the council hopes to use the
management information generated by the systems to assess the
effectiveness of its strategy and identify areas for improvement.
Feedback will be used to improve the community planning process and
to underpin longer-term strategic thinking.
In practice, the strategy means that whenever customers talk to
the council, staff will immediately be able to call up the history
of their previous dealings on screen. They can then check on the
progress of issues raised, or set in train resolving a new issue,
"owning" the problem from start to finish.
Apart from providing a better service to customers and saving on
staff time, this process will also provide valuable management
information. The system will be capable of revealing what issues
and problems most affect local citizens. This will then be matched
with social-profiling information to reveal a more detailed picture
of the needs of specific groups of people living in different parts
of Leeds so that resources can be focused on the most needy
areas.
For council staff, the CRM software will provide a simple
interface into legacy systems and enable them to automatically send
faxes, e-mails and completed forms to other users on the network,
instead of putting paper into the internal post.
Leeds residents, or customers as they are now known, will
benefit in many ways, not least in having a more standardised
approach to their dealings with the council. One phone call or
visit should resolve their problem.
Councillor Keith Wakefield, executive board member for what was
the customer service department but which is now called Community
Planning and Regeneration, says, "The CRM software will make it
much easier for people to gain help and information on our
services. We will also be able to better target information and
services according to customers' needs, leading the way to further
improvements in the way the council serves the people of
Leeds."
In adopting CRM technology, Leeds is the first customer of the
recently announced alliance between IT services company ICL and
Siebel Systems, supplier of CRM software. ICL is training more than
500 consultants to deliver Siebel consulting and implementation
services, positioning it as a key Siebel strategic partner, and
also deploying Siebel's applications internally for key sales
processes, involving the training of over 3,000 staff
worldwide.
The companies will also collaborate more in future on
development of new CRM solutions for key industry sectors,
including government, and integrate ICL's loyalty and marketing
applications, e-business solutions and customer data warehouse
technologies with Siebel's Front Office suite.
At Leeds the Siebel Enterprise CRM customer service and call
centre software will be deployed in all the customer service
centres during the course of this year. The key modules involve
computer telephony integration (CTI), Smartscript (to ensure common
high standards of processing customer enquiries), and workflow. The
software's customer agent and contact/service-tracking capabilities
will initially support 90 front-desk council staff, helping them
improve the consistency, quality and speed of service to Leeds
citizens.
Extend access
The CRM roll-out within customer services is also the first
stage in a much bigger strategy to implement the Siebel software
throughout Leeds City Council. The overall vision is still being
agreed and funding sought, but there are plans to use the software
in other departments and also extend its access to the ward-based
teams. It will also eventually be opened up to local citizens, for
example so they can fill out local government forms online, or get
information via Wap (wireless application protocol) mobile
phones.
John Bennett, director of ICL's government business,
acknowledges the efforts that Leeds Council is making to transform
first its customer services and then the rest of the council to
improve the image of local government for the better. He describes
the council as "one of the most forward-thinking local authorities
in the UK today".
But Leeds Council's IT project manager, Chris Derry, is modest
about the council's achievements. "Although we are at the forefront
of the move towards a customer-centric approach to local
government, other councils are catching on to the idea of one-stop
shops like ours and the use of CRM software."
It's all exciting leading-edge stuff for local government staff
and a far cry from what was in place in Leeds barely three years
ago, according to Derry.
"If someone wanted to make an enquiry to one or more of our
departments they were faced with making a number of telephone
calls," he says. "Even then there were far too many numbers in the
telephone directory and it wasn't clear which one they should
ring.
"When the customer got through, staff might not have been able
to answer the enquiry. The best they could do was point the
customer in another direction. People were being passed around
departments with no-one owning the problem.
"We've since rationalised the telephone numbers and introduced a
call centre which went live in March with 45 staff. We're now in
the process of collecting management information to see how many
calls we're getting and to ensure we are meeting the needs of the
community."
Today, if a Leeds citizen calls the council requesting a house
repair job then the customer services officer who takes the call
will respond to the request right through to booking an appointment
for a surveyor to visit to assess the situation.
"This means we're providing a better service and it's more
efficient, which generates cost-savings, and it means that people
don't have to make repeat calls to the council to sort their
problem out," adds Derry.
But the move to treat people as valuable customers and create a
front-to-back office seamless service has not been without its
headaches. Derry says that the biggest management challenge has
been rooting out the established working culture in the council,
which was very much one of "us and them" between the front,
customer-facing staff and back-office support workers.
"We had to change people's mindsets - convince them that they
are responsible for more than just the activities in their own
department and that they can rely on the performance of others,"
says Derry. "Blurring the dividing-line between departments meant
quite a lengthy process of agreeing service levels and delivery
agreements between customer services and the other
departments."
To bring home the importance of the customer in the minds of
staff, all customer-facing posts are now higher paid than
back-office positions.
For the IT department's 100 staff, the culture shock revolved
around introducing pioneering new technologies with additional
functionality. Leeds was one of the first UKcouncils to use an
intranet to provide information for customer services offices from
a common repository database.
It has also been quite a departure to use third-party suppliers
and business partners. The chosen software development strategy -
the rapid application development methodology DSDM - was alien to
anything staff had used before.
"We had to deploy DSDM because the timescales were quite tight
for delivering the customer service programme," says Derry.
However, apart from help from ICL in handling the change
management programme and dealing with the cultural impact of the
move to a customer-centric approach. Leeds has also benefited from
a skills transfer from ICL's IT staff to its own people.
"Because of this skills transfer we know that we can easily
carry on and do further software development work and support the
CRM project once this initial phase with ICL is over, in
September," says Derry.
Everyone within Leeds City Council has had to undergo training
to absorb the council's new focus on the customer as king. All 150
customer service staff have undergone extensive training to learn
how to treat people as customers, working through around 40
training modules.
The courses ranged from customer care, which all staff across
the authority have attended, to more specific training in
functional areas such as housing repairs and social services.
Leeds' success in breaking down the barriers between itself and
the people it serves has much to do with it being run along
business lines, but Derry isn't complacent.
"We've made a good start but I don't think we've totally licked
it yet," he says. "There's still much to do, but we're getting
there."
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