Many UK local authorities have implemented CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. One important use that Councils make of their CRM systems is to provide forms on their websites. Citizens can use these forms to submit comments, complaints or requests to their council. The CRM uses workflow to route the submission to the appropriate department; and to track, manage and record the response.
Tom Steinberg runs mySociety, a group that develops web 2.0 applications to enable citizens to influence government and politics. One of these applications 'FixMyStreet' makes it easy for anybody, anywhere in Great Britain to report something that needs repairing/cleaning/removing. They simply click on a map to indicate where the nuisance is and add any details they want to provide. They can also upload a photograph. The citizen does not need to know which tier of Local Authority (Borough, Unitary, County, City) is responsible for the problem. FixMySite will send an e-mail to the Council responsible, and track the response.
The service has angered Local Authority IT managers who, according to this report in The Guardian, gave Tom Steinberg a hostile reception at a recent SocITM conference. The problem is that the e-mails sent by FixMyStreet bypass the CRM systems, and the Council therefore finds the queries harder to process, control, track, record and report on. The IT managers want mySociety to build interfaces from FixMyStreet to the Council CRM systems. MySociety say that is unfeasible because there are hundreds of local authorities and each different Authority's CRM would require a seperate interface.
The lesson to be drawn from this stand off? Organisations can invest in on-line channels of communciation which they hope that their audience use, but if their customers/citizens opt to use an alternative channel there may not be a lot they can do about it.
James Lappin
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