Corporate CRMS

"Single, corporate-wide Customer Relationship Management System, possibly shared with partners, in full use for all customer transactions via all channels"

Most councils throughout the UK already have a Customer Relationship Management System (CRMS), though relatively few appear to be making full use of it. In some cases, the system has hardly been taken out of the box, and in some others, not only is it not serving a useful purpose, it is actually having a negative impact on customer service.

Introducing a corporate CRMS on its own serves little purpose - it has to be part of a broader strategy for customer service, in which the CRMS manages all customer transactions through all available channels - whether it be through face to face contact, telephone contact through the contact centre, e-mail contact, or transactions over the web.

Ideally a single CRMS will service all customer-facing public services for a local area - council, non-emergency police enquiries, non-emergency fire and rescue enquiries, health, housing, and other services as appropriate to the local community.

But increasingly, councils are asking whether a CRMS is actually necessary - when the same functionality can be provided as part of the web content management system (CMS). Certainly not having a CRMS can save a sizeable annual licence fee, not to mention the application support costs internally, and for many councils a better result can be achieved by using the content management system for the website instead. Of course this only works if the web really is at the heart of the organisation - the tool that customer facing staff use to deal with customer enquiries and service requests, the system that customers use for serving thesmselves, and the tool that other organisations (such as Citizens Advice) use for advising their clients about service entitlements. Used in this way, the CRM functionality offered by the CMS provides what councils have long dreamed of - a single complete source of information of all the interactions between council and customer for all customers and all services.