City fine-tunes customer service
- By Dibya Sarkar
- Jul 10, 2002
City of Des Moines
Des Moines, Iowa, has come a long way since an internal study two years
ago revealed inconsistencies in the way the city handled and tracked service
requests and other calls from the public.
Employees used methods ranging from "sticky yellow notes" to Microsoft
Corp. Access to log or pass along information. Now, the city may well be
on the leading edge of using customer relationship management (CRM) tools
to help smooth interaction between government and citizens.
"I would say they're in the vanguard," said Denis Pombriant, the Aberdeen
Group's vice president and managing director of the company's CRM practice.
In a February report, Aberdeen called Des Moines' system one of the 10 most
significant CRM implementations of 2001.
The city, which has a population of about 200,000, went live with its
decentralized "citizen response system" — a modified version of an earlier
FrontRange Solutions Inc. software. The system enables employees at PCs
to track problems, provide service alerts and build a knowledge base "to
try to capture what essentially was in people's heads throughout the organization,"
said Michael Armstrong, the city's chief information officer.
It cost about $200,000, including a developer's salary for a year and
FrontRange's help to modify the software, Armstrong said. Without the company's
help, he said it would've cost $500,000.
"The goal was to codify enough information that no matter who answers
the phone, the citizen was going to get one answer," he said. To date, the
city has logged 1,250 different types of calls, such as complaints about
missed garbage pickups, and has about 450 users in the system. The city
has been logging more than 10,000 calls a month, and he said that about
80 percent of the answers to those calls can be found on the city's official
Web site ({http://www.ci.des-moines.ia.us} www.ci.des-moines.ia.us).
The system also alerts officials to problems. For example, if missed
garbage pickup calls go from 100 a month to 400, that indicates there's
a problem somewhere, Armstrong said. Or if the established standard for
filling potholes is two days, and the account is still open on the third
day, the system will alert a supervisor, he said.
The real problem in creating the system was not technology, but culture.
Municipal officials interested in the system have visited — including from
Japan and Denmark — and have inquired about the culture problem, Armstrong
said.
"First, how do you convince people to give up the knowledge and how
do you convince people it's a good thing?" he asked, adding that "wheedling,
convincing and sometimes using a hammer" are some methods. "As people begin
to use it, they begin to see it's making [their] job easier. Enthusiasm
tends to build a little bit."
Armstrong said cities such as Mobile, Ala., Hampton, Va., Houston and
Philadelphia have or are planning to implement CRM systems.
But Pombriant said it's still early in this country and "a number of
vendors have hung out their shingles and begun offering technologies that
are CRM focused for the government sector." In Europe, he said there appears
to be more CRM implementations on a national or regional level, but it doesn't
necessarily mean the United States is behind.
"And this is just a hypothesis, it could be that European governments
are more constituent-focused due to their more liberal situations or backgrounds,"
he said, citing social welfare and health care programs.
Pombriant added that he didn't think the flat economy here is going
to hinder CRM.
"I think the experience that we've seen in the broader marketplace suggests
that in leaner economic times, people don't abandon CRM concepts because
they recognize the inherent value in them," he said. "But what does happen
is that organizations of all kinds — whether they're businesses or governments
— look for different and better ways to achieve their goals."