✍️ CRM in local government

I’ve been doing some digging into CRM for a couple of clients recently, and thought I’d share my crib sheet here. Hopefully useful!

Summary

Before doing anything relating to CRM, some fundamental questions must be answered:

• What does the council mean by ‘CRM’ and does everyone understand and agree with this?
• Is there a strategy set out in terms of what the CRM should deliver for the council?
• Based on the above, has the council made a strategic decisions as to whether an off the shelf CRM, or a build and configure option is best to realise those ambitions?

What is ‘CRM’?

This feels like a silly question to ask, but actually, many people have differing views on what a CRM actually is. There’s no right answer, particularly – the important thing is that everyone in the room is aligned in terms of the definition being used during that discussion.

CRM stands for ‘customer relationship management’ and has its origins in sales activities: allowing companies to track engagement with potential customers, going through various stages to eventually – hopefully – making a sale.

Non-sales driven organisations – like councils – often use CRM software to help manage service rather than sales. Rather than tracking the progress of deals, they track the progress of cases. The broad benefits of this are:

• To ensure that different staff have access to the full record relating to a case, so they can pick it up and progress it
• To enable performance management of cases, to ensure they are being dealt with in a timely manner 
• To help set quality standards of customer service in dealing with cases
• To provide a dataset that can be analysed to help drive continuous improvement or radical redesign of services.  

There are two broad approaches to CRM solutions. I go into these in more detail below (‘How to implement’). These are:

• Off the shelf CRM software, designed specifically for that purpose. Local government tends to be more interested in the service rather than sales side of things.
• Self developed CRM-like solutions, either hard coded by developers or built using low code platforms and other cloud components.

Before embarking on a CRM project, it’s vital that everyone is aligned on what they mean by CRM, and what the purpose of having one is. By doing so, the council will be able to determine whether it should buy an off the shelf solution, or configure something themselves. 

One thing that must be avoided at all costs is going out to procure without these decisions being made. A procurement that encourages responses from both of these types of provider creates huge amounts of confusion as a result of a lack of clear overarching strategy.

Why have a CRM? 

As discussed, CRM often means different things to different people. In the local government context, a CRM delivers on one or more of the following outcomes:

• Contact management for customer services, so records of a customer’s previous interactions are easy to access
• An integrated ‘window’ for customer service staff to access data in line of business systems
• Simple case management flows for services that do not have line of business systems
• Replacement of line of business systems by reusing CRM components
• A comprehensive database of customer interactions that can be analysed to enable the prevention of expensive demand through early intervention
• A platform for customer facing digital service delivery including forms, communications, workflows, and integrations

Key to successful implementation is being absolutely clear on which of these outcomes are desired, and mobilising the project around that. 

It must be acknowledged that doing all of these things is not an option – it will take too long, be too costly, and will mean nothing gets delivered in practice. 

Understanding which of these outcomes are most important to the council will then help to determine whether an off the shelf solution is needed, or something configured locally. 

How to choose a CRM solution

Once the objectives are clear, there is a technical decision to be made as to whether an off the shelf solution is procured or a platform for configuring the necessary workflows locally. Below I describe some of the aspects of each approach that are worth considering, followed by a quick reference table of pros and cons for each one.

Off the shelf

There are many different options available for CRM software. Those suitable for organisations with the scale of a UK unitary council include Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and SugarCRM. There are others!

Key to making the most of an off the shelf CRM is to ‘adopt’ rather than ‘adapt’. This means accepting that the software works in a certain way, and fitting into that, rather than heavily customising the software to adapt it to the way the council works. The latter is possible, but becomes incredibly expensive and  difficult to maintain.  

This fact creates an issue for councils however, because of the incredibly varied nature of the services they deliver. Off the shelf CRM is designed to work for the majority of organisations, and the majority of organisations tend to do a handful of things, not hundreds, and certainly not with such wildly different operating models as collecting refuse, delivering social care, and assessing planning applications.

Therefore a major consideration is to weigh up the outcomes the council wishes to achieve from CRM, and the amount of work it would take to redesign services to fit with the off the shelf CRM model. 

If the council’s CRM strategy is to simply have a customer contact record, with no deep integration into back office services, and accepting the reduction of deep service related data in the platform, that might be ok. If however the desire is to do more than that, then a different approach may be required.

Other considerations:

• Enterprise grade CRMs tend to have a wide pool of talent to tap into. However because of the popularity of the systems, such people are often in demand from sectors that don’t have the financial constraints that local government has. Therefore, accessing the skills can be pricey.
• Historically councils have found it difficult to insource the support of significant customisations that have been implemented by partners and contractors, resulting in dependence on expensive external resources
• Licensing costs for off the shelf CRM can get extremely expensive once a council starts to roll out access beyond the traditional customer services department. So where custom workflows are built that go into the back office, licensing those users can increase costs significantly. If the strategy is to embed CRM in the back office, this could be a real issue.

Self-developed solutions

The alternative to buying off the shelf is to build your own. While this can mean using developers to hard code entirely bespoke solutions, most councils tend to settle on a main ‘low code’ style platform, integrated with other systems and components as needed. Examples of common platforms used in local government include Microsoft’s Power Platform, Netcall Liberty Create, Granicus GovService, Mendix, and Outsystems.

Often these platforms will come with some pre-configured common applications, such as a generic content management solution, perhaps a simple standard case management tool, and so on. But generally, everything will need to be created by the council themselves. This is made much easier if the council already has in house knowledge of the platform, although training for developers is usually provided by the supplier.

Because little is provided out of the box, the benefit for the council is that it only needs to develop what it needs, and it can be designed to do exactly what the council wants. This means that whatever the strategy the council wants to adopt for CRM, it ought to be possible to achieve – within the limits of time, budget, and so on. 

The flexibility of this approach means that by building up confidence and development expertise in the platform, more workloads can be moved into it. This is unlikely to lead to the replacement of major line of business systems, but could see the rationalisation of more generic case management solutions into the common platform. 

Other considerations

• Depending on the licensing model of the provider, the initial costings can seem high. However, if the strategy is to rollout out access to applications built on the platform across the council, this will usually become extremely cost effective.
• Many low code platforms market themselves as being suitable for “citizen developers” – a rather vague term that doesn’t really present the reality. The experience of councils is that some technical knowledge is required to be good at using these platforms, along with experience of managing and designing databases, and having some understand of good user experience practice. Many councils have been able to quickly retrain existing staff used to working with forms, tools like Sharepoint, and processes into highly effective low code developers.
• Vendor lock in is raised as a risk with these platforms. However, the risk is really no greater than with any other software choice. As with any technology investment, a focus on data portability should ensure historic case data can be accessed following the exiting of the vendor.

Pros and cons of each approach

	Off the shelf CRM	Self-developed
Examples	Microsoft Dynamics  Salesforce SugarCRM	Microsoft Power Platform  Netcall Liberty Create  Granicus GovService Mendix  Outsystems
Pros	Many common CRM workflows will be pre-built Large (but expensive) support ecosystem Provides integrated access to enterprise grade data and AI tools (usually at additional cost)	Councils don’t pay for functionality they don’t use Simple to build out bespoke workflows Usually works out cheaper to license to large numbers of staff
Cons	High licensing cost beyond core contact centre Often originally designed for organisations with very different operating models to councils  Requires significant cross-council buy-in and investment to deliver	Very little works ‘out of the box’ Market for skills can be more challenging for more niche technologies  Risk of being reliant on smaller, less resilient suppliers