Southwark Council is conducting a major analysis of how
the public uses its services after creating a single view of its
“customers”.
The London borough council achieved the single customer view by
integrating its customer relationship management and business
intelligence applications.
Managers at the council can now see who is using their services
and when they are using them.
Council IT director David Curry said, “The big aim of the
project was to get the single view of the customer so we could
understand how our customers were interacting across all the
different council systems.”
The authority moved three of its largest services on to MySAP
CRM and SAP Business Information Warehouse over the past 12
months.
It began by consolidating three customer contact centres into
one and implementing MySAP CRM in the new centre in May 2005.
The council followed the launch of the contact centre with a
year-long effort to integrate MySAP CRM with its housing repairs,
revenues and benefits and environment and leisure IT systems.
The system enables contact centre staff to answer queries about
25 separate council services. Southwark plans to integrate all of
its remaining legacy applications with the CRM system.
Curry said, “We accepted that by just adding a CRM layer on top,
we would not get any efficiencies. By doing the integration, we got
the benefits.”
The council will benefit financially from the integration
exercise when it removes some 60 legacy applications this
September. According to Curry, this will save Southwark £2m in
software licences over the next five years.