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CSS has partnered with leading Microsoft CRM partner JayThom in winning the recent tender to implement Microsoft CRM for Baw Baw Shire Council. |
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Phil Stone, Director Planning and Information, Baw Baw Shire Council:
"Baw Baw Shire has developed a 'First Point of Contact' customer service strategy, as part of an Australian Business Excellence framework initiative in continuous service improvement. When council went to tender to procure a customer service solution to replace its ageing request management system, it found little choice in the marketplace and certainly nothing that had been proven in Local Government.
Most systems participating in the tender appeared to deliver against a request management approach, while the Shire’s aim was to provide a customer centric view of information so that the enquiries can be solved at the first point of contact with council. When we discovered Microsoft’s Citizen Services Framework, we decided to work with Microsoft to ascertain the fit of Dynamics CRM for Local Government and our operations - to not only test the feasibility of the system for our use, but to provide intellectual property that would be beneficial to the Local Government sector as a whole.
This proved true and, since then, we have completed a pilot project within the customer service and statutory areas of council to further test its feasibility. CSS and JayThom have worked extensively with Microsoft and council staff to consult, implement and test the system to ensure its benefits are realised. In the early implementation phase, already we are seeing a positive sentiment from employees working and training on CouncilRM™. While it will be a new way of working from the traditional Request Management approach, the benefits of appropriately assigning tasks and working directly out of Outlook are already being realised. Building knowledge through a central system that provides a single 'customer view' is proving difficult for some staff to grasp, but others are enthusiastically anticipating the 'Go-live' date. We intend to test the pilot live for a period of three months to and incorporate the feedback gained to rollout to the remainder of the organisation allowing a consistent customer service process across the whole organisation.
CouncilRM™ will provide the first step towards the shire’s information systems vision of a 'dynamic workspace presenting the right information to workers based on their identity', and will be the catalyst for delivering our first point of contact customer strategy. Additionally, we are confident that CouncilRM™ will be able to integrate with other council systems over time to provide a single view of customer information for council staff and provide other vital workflow functionality which we don’t have – such as integration with web, fax and phone; emergency management; community engagement and events and marketing