City of Des Moines Brings CRM to the Public Sector

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1 Case Studies, W. Janowski Research Note 20 November 2002 City of Des Moines Brings CRM to the Public Sector Implementing customer relationship management in the public sector reflects a unique challenge. The primary driver is not profit, but rather citizen satisfaction and confidence. Core Topics Customer Relationship Management: Business Strategies, Technologies and Apps. for Customer Service and Support; Creating Business Value for CRM Key Issue During the next five years, how will skills, architectures and technologies evolve to enable enterprises to develop moreprofitable customer relationships? Des Moines, with 200,000 residents, is Iowa's capital. Des Moines anchors a region of 400,000 residents and is the largest city in the state. The city's 2,100 employees and 15 departments provide a range of municipal services, including police and fire protection, traffic management, street construction and maintenance, waste collection and treatment, and community and social services. Des Moines operates golf courses, swimming pools, parks, trails, a zoo and other civic facilities. It interacts with its residents through numerous channels, including walk-up counters, telephone, a Web site and its own TV channel. With so many departments, employees and services, the city realized that the difficulties in managing its interactions with its "customers" (that is, its residents) resulted in inefficient operations and inconsistent levels of service. The city took on the challenge of addressing customer relationship management (CRM) in a not-for-profit government environment. Unlike CRM in the private sector, CRM initiatives for government entities tend to be most focused on customer experience and efficiency; benefits like improving revenue are not generally motivating factors. Problem A city-established cross-departmental process improvement team identified a number of problems in how the city responded to requests from citizens for services or information: Inconsistent response to citizen requests No established response levels to citizen requests No consistent tracking mechanisms to monitor response levels No consistent reporting mechanisms to quantify response levels Gartner Entire contents 2002 Gartner, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 Cross-departmental "disappearance" (that is, citizen requests would "drop through the cracks" when passing between departments) Anticipated staff turnover in the face of departmental reorganization Objective As part of its mission to address the concerns, the improvement team identified a series of action items, which were reviewed and endorsed by the city manager and the various department heads: Develop a single system the Citizen Response System (CRS) to be used by all departments to manage, track and improve the response to citizens. Develop a consistent response to customer requests, regardless of the point of entry into the system or the communications channel selected by the citizen. Develop a single system for measuring and reporting performance in delivering citizen-requested services. Develop methods for capturing the tacit and explicit knowledge held by employees. Approach CRM Vision and Strategy: The city of Des Moines' overall vision focused on delivering a method to consistently respond to customer requests through a single system that would be used by all internal departments. To improve the opportunities for success of the system, the city identified several key goals. It also realized that it must not only secure the strong support of the organization's management team by requiring the unanimous consent of department heads and the enthusiastic support of the city's elected and appointed officials before beginning development, but that it must also make that support explicit and public. The system needed to be designed in collaboration with those employees directly involved in interaction with citizens, either through personal contact or through the delivery of specific services. It was necessary to develop a distributed system that did not require the centralization of citizen contact and that was transparent to the citizen's interaction with the city, thus removing the implicit threat of employee job elimination. CRM Customer Experience: The contact experience for Des Moines' citizens has improved since the system was implemented. Transfers of calls have been reduced, since anyone who takes a call has access to the same information. Citizens are now provided with consistent answers from the entire organization, reducing their frustration level and 20 November

3 demonstrating respect for their time. Call data has helped drive the development of the city's Web presence by identifying those areas of greatest and most consistent concern. Although there is anecdotal evidence of improvement, a customer satisfaction survey is in progress to help document and quantify the results. Organizational Collaboration: Small groups of personnel from each department were tasked with identifying every type of call or request that the city receives from its citizens. These groups, composed of staff and line-level personnel from all 15 departments, included those who had direct contact with citizens, as well as those individuals who actually provide city services. In an iterative process, these groups also developed "detail screens" that provided the information required to respond with information or services to each of those call types. The number of call types identified and detail screens developed in this manner is currently 1,280. Once that data was assembled, the same individuals helped develop a taxonomy and classification system that led to a navigable system. Departmental teams worked directly with design staff to ensure that the system recognized these differences, and that the appropriate customization was done to meet departmental requirements. A system user's group is active and meets monthly to discuss continuing development issues. CRM Processes: One of the goals of the city's CRS is to devise processes that would transfer control of interaction with the city to the citizen. During system process evaluation, it was determined that the citizen should control the communication channel and the point of entry to the system, and that the city's response should be the same regardless of the choices made by the citizen. By distributing the knowledge required to fulfill information and service requests throughout the organization, and by making similar functionality available on the Web, citizens can now complete most of their transactions with a single contact. Telephone transfers have been minimized and time constraints have been eased through implementation of a Webbased Des Moines self-service module. Data from the CRS has compelled some departments to make substantial changes to their business processes, including changing hours of operation, reallocating staff functions or even developing departmental call centers. The city is also very focused on location-based information. It is as important for the city to know where something happened as it is to know who made the contact. Information: A minimal amount of data was imported into the new system. Data from the prior systems was so inconsistent and fragmented as to be generally useless, so the new system essentially started from a zero point. A strategic decision was made to sacrifice any potential baseline knowledge to avoid the 20 November

4 high expense that would have resulted from attempting to clean and standardize the previous data. The system is collecting data with a single system that is used by all departments. Activity is reported by call type across the enterprise, and very basic performance reporting is done on a departmental basis. The comprehensive dataset consists of all logged calls (currently about 60 percent of the 25,000 external calls received each month). The call types were developed and agreed on by departmental personnel, and the taxonomy development took approximately one year. This phase was completed before development of the system got under way. Data from the CRS provides, for the first time, a comprehensive set of data about the operation of the city's service delivery system. By standardizing the method by which data from customer contacts is reported across the entire enterprise, allocation of resources is now more efficient, and response to systemic community concerns is more rapid and effective. Perhaps the most valuable feature of consolidated data collection has been the impetus to ask: "Why?" If a particular call type is consistently at a high level, serious investigation into the nature and causes of the problem is now possible. Technology: The city elected to implement the middle layer of what are essentially three layers of CRM in the public sector: call taking/call centers, contact and response management, and work order generation and management. The product selected was Heat from FrontRange Solutions. An evaluation of available products revealed that the Heat product could easily be modified to meet the requirements of the CRS, would operate on the city's standard database (SQL Server), would operate well on the city's fiber network and would be amenable to Web-based operation. The resulting system is essentially a citizen's help desk. Des Moines' technology environment is highly standardized, with a centrally controlled network and limited user choice in desktop hardware and software. This standardization greatly simplified system implementation. The most complex part of the system implementation was integration with a number of enterprise-level external systems. The city experienced technical challenges in two areas. The first was the requirement to customize parts of the system to meet very specific needs of business units providing a wide range of services, from solid waste collection to the investigation of human rights complaints. This made system design and development more complex than anticipated. The second was weaknesses in the city's geographic information system (GIS), particularly related to the accuracy of address-based information, which have limited some of the potential of the system. An 20 November

5 associated project to improve GIS accuracy is expected to provide substantial benefits for the CRS. Metrics: The city currently reports basic call-volume statistics, organized by request type. The system has alerting capability that notifies appropriate personnel or automatically escalates problems when times expected for work completion exceed established levels. The integration of CRS data with the city's GIS provides valuable location-based data that is being used to measure the effectiveness of service delivery. In one example where there was quantifiable improvement, the city began to see an increase in calls about graffiti coming from a particular area of the city. At one point, the work backlog in this area exceeded 30 days. Based on call statistics, an additional crew was assigned to this work. The backlog is now zero. In another case, a pilot program was conducted for automated refuse collection, using a single driver in a suitably equipped vehicle. Using CRS data and the city's GIS, the city was able to plot, for a single route, for a single day, the exact number and location of addresses that had material not in the provided container and which required manual loading. This information caused the city to modify the collection operation, using an "express" vehicle, which only collects noncontainerized refuse, while allowing all containers to be serviced by the automated vehicle and a single driver. The primary metric Des Moines is trying to reach is the measurement of the time and resources required to complete a service request. Although the mechanism to do that is in place now, the absence of established service levels limits the value of those results. Service levels, publicly stated, provide a benchmark for the citizens and a standard that may be used internally to make adjustments in resource allocation and business processes. Establishing service levels is currently being complicated by budgetary issues that affect what those service levels can be. Results By far the most significant accomplishment is the development of the system itself. The other significant accomplishments include the development of a truly enterprisewide view of the city's service system and the development of accurate and consistent data that help enable the operation of that system. The ability to use current GIS information to provide location context to much of that data has already proved useful. 20 November

6 Although the value of increased service quality and customer satisfaction is difficult to quantify, some useful metrics have emerged from Des Moines' CRS. For example, the city has discovered that approximately 80 percent of the calls it receives are for static information. This has led to a strong emphasis on moving more customer interaction to the city's Web site, where information can be provided much less expensively. Other metrics have led to process change at the departmental level, with varying levels of efficiency improvements resulting from those changes. Critical Success Factors/Lessons Learned Among the lessons learned in Des Moines are: Do not make a CRM implementation the first major change initiative for the organization. CRM affects the core business processes of the entire organization and requires a high degree of organizational competence and trust to succeed. Some employees will not willingly participate despite great efforts to secure their cooperation through informal means. Don't be afraid to "use the hammer" when necessary. Departments often must be taught through "evangelism" and training that the system can help improve their operations. Solid executive support and strong project management are imperatives. Acronym Key CRM CRS GIS Customer relationship management Citizen Response System Geographic information system Bottom Line: In a public-sector environment, the most significant challenge is often the development of the processes that drive the system. Internal cultural barriers will also be substantial in many governments, and a true focus on citizens as customers will be difficult to achieve. The primary driver is not profit, but citizen satisfaction and confidence. The private sector implements CRM and aims at customer satisfaction to increase profitability. In the public sector, customer satisfaction is an end in itself. 20 November