Alabama interaction automated

Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's office has turned to an automated system to

keep citizens' requests and complaints from falling through the cracks.

"We had no means of tracking constituent contact," said deputy press

secretary Janel Bell.

Now, instead of relying on sticky notes and to-do lists, members of

the governor's staff receive pop-up flags on their monitors reminding them

to follow up on the thousands of letters, e-mail messages, phone calls and

faxes they receive each week. That's just one of the features available

with Intranet Quorum, a citizen relationship management solution by ACS

Desktop Solutions Inc.

Intranet Quorum is a Web-based system that tracks contact with citizens

and keeps a history of those interactions on a database. It integrates with

e-mail, major word processing programs and existing databases.

Calls and correspondence are logged into the system; a keyword search

generates a work assignment and routes a message to the appropriate employee.

Intranet Quorum also helps if, for example, a citizen calls to check on

the status of a complaint: The first call-taker can use the system to provide

an update right away.

"It's the Federal Express model of always tracking where anything is

at a given time," said Mark Searle, ACS' director for state and local market

development. "The primary value is that when the citizen hangs up the phone

or gets their response backthey feel like they've been treated as a very

important customer of government."

The ACS software is used extensively in the federal government, including

the White House.