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GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

CRM crosses over

By By David Essex, Special to GCN

One of the few emerging software categories to survive the dot-com crash of the early 2000s was customer relationship management software.

Cash-strapped companies saw in it a cost-effective way to prop up bottom lines by holding onto existing customers. More recently, CRM has been crossing over into government, as agencies facing e-government mandates have come to appreciate the benefits of streamlined, cheaper, yet more effective contact with constituents.

New York City, for example, has for two years run a 311 service for nonemergency calls using CRM software from Siebel Systems Inc. “Any citizen in New York can call 311 and get an answer to their question, and get pointed to a service,” Siebel spokesman Robert Pinkerton said.

In government, the “C” in CRM now stands for citizen, but the customer can just as easily be an agency employee visiting a CRM-driven, Web-based help desk to inquire about medical benefits.

Call centers staffed with harried agents inundated with phone calls can access CRM’s consolidated data and scripts to finish each call quickly. They can also route calls to a well-used self-service Web portal or interactive voice response system that accesses the same database to handle inquiries typed into the keypad or spoken into a voice recognition system.

Besides serving constituents more efficiently, such automation can reduce labor and IT costs.

Unique to goverment

But experts say CRM is harder to build in government because the greater number of legacy systems makes all-important data consolidation more difficult, and stricter privacy laws put a damper on the breadth or depth of information that customer-facing software agents can see.

Enterprise CRM packages all have at their core a highly searchable knowledge base that holds nearly every piece of information that has been collected about a customer, including paper documents scanned and electronically stored in a document management repository.

Another defining feature is integration with back-office applications, such as enterprise resource planning packages from PeopleSoft Inc., Oracle Corp. and SAP America Inc., where agency human-resource and financial records reside. Without access to such information, the packages would be little more than their progenitors—sales force automation tools.

“When we bring CRM to the government, it’s part of a broad solution offering,” said Pat Bakey, SAP America’s senior vice president. He cites an ongoing effort at Customs and Border Protection to integrate an existing SAP back-office system with a newer front-office CRM module that helps manage security-sensitive, multiagency interactions with worldwide cargo shippers.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Management, New Products / Technology, Products Central



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