CRM & Data analysis — day 5

Lets look at where this council that I am working with is today. In the 1990’s government of the time, encouraged by good developments with private sector organisations developing CRM systems to sell their services, woke up one day and decreed that this was the solution to the old fashioned and expensive public sector services. So, they provided money for councils to purchase CRM systems, and to set up contact centres.

As everyone who knows about these things already know, when a council is offered money, it will do whatever it is asked to get that money. And councils with any sense took the opportunity. Forward in time 10 years, and there are few councils that retain their legacy CRM systems.

The promise was that everything about residents would be recorded that would then create a rich picture of residents. Which in turn would help the public sector to deal with those ‘customer’ far better.

Oh, and yes, we started to call our citizens Customers. It would cut costs, improve the quality of customer services, and provide wonderful data. Sounds familiar?

Demand Analysis Findings that Might Surprise You

Coming back to today, a detailed analysis has just been carried out by someone brought in who knows how to analyse such things, and these are some of the findings.

• we have masses amount of information about residents.
• in the great majority of cases we never go back and use that information
• there was no correlation between location and problems.
• There was little correlation between those in debt with the council and volume of calls from them.
• when we do attempt to analyse the data, little that is useful is evident.

To give one example, one hoped for result was to be an identification of people with complex needs. The analysis found little real correlation with area of the borough and the volume of calls, to complexity and people with significant needs. When the team took apart the top cases manually, they came up with a list of those who were in complex situations of need. Then what do you think happened when this information was passed on to some front line staff?

“Oh yes, we know them…”

So our staff already knew who they were, we did not need data analysis to let us something we didn’t know!

It took… 2.5 months full time work to pull out the learning from the CRM and other systems.

I dont really know what to say about this as it raises too many questions in my head. Do you imagine that the shiny suited sales person who sold the system a few years ago told them it would take 2.5 months to collate and then you will learn very little?

We don’t even know if the CRM system is providing value or improving anything.

Anyway, the data and its analysis report was not my thing, I was simply reading it to look for learning. I found little that was useful, and it reinforced by experience that CRM and the public sector were a solution looking for a problem. And it confirmed that to populate CRM required a significant amount of manual entry.

This council also had an online account system that allowed the public to log in to their account to deal with simple transactional issues. The system was unpopular and required manual links with existing council systems to complete the transactions! But thats another story.