About the Client

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790.
The Government of the District of Columbia holds a unique status in our country’s political system, functioning as a state, county, and city. The complexity of the District government is seen in the many different roles performed by its more than 100 individual agencies. Like other state and local governments, the District government provides hundreds of citizen and business services, resulting in a complex customer service environment. Contributing to the complexity is a lack of a common technology infrastructure and information sharing among government agencies.
Committed to improving agency-wide customer service, the District government formed a team-including several consultants from CherryRoad Technologies-to devise a CRM strategy. The mission was precedent setting in that it represented the first time that a major city developed a CRM strategy across all of their agencies. CherryRoad’s extensive experience with CRM strategy development, business process assessment/redesign, change management and public sector engagements were key to their inclusion on the District’s team.

Client Challenge

• To integrate the District’s customer service environment, thus enhancing operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction.
• A business analysis, technical architecture design, implementation strategy and cost-benefit analysis to identify project ROI and cost savings.

CherryRoad Solution

CherryRoad Technologies teamed with the District to design a strategy for an enterprise-wide CRM solution incorporating best practices and optimized technologies.

Business analysis: assessing present-day and desired future business processes

The first step in developing a CRM strategy is to conduct an analysis of existing and desired future business processes. During this phase, CherryRoad and its team partners conducted interviews with individual agencies to gather information on current business issues, as well as customer-service practices and initiatives. They also held interagency focus groups to learn about optimal business processes.

Technical architecture design: designing a best-in-class CRM system

Through a technical infrastructure discovery process, the strategy team identified all current systems that could be impacted by-or potentially used for-a District-wide CRM implementation. Based on this assessment, the team designed the technical architecture for a best-in-class CRM system tailored to meet the District’s goals.

Implementation plan: assuring long-term success through short-term wins

CherryRoad and its team partners devised a strategic CRM implementation plan based on best practices and input gathered from District agencies. The plan was designed to ensure quick wins that would provide ongoing morale boosters and a solid foundation for the large-scale CRM rollout.

Cost-Benefit analysis: determining the final payoff

As a final step, the strategy team put together a detailed cost-benefit analysis to identify the project ROI and cost savings to be realized by the District. The result: a comprehensive solution strategy that will support the District’s customer service goals. Among the components of the District government’s CRM solution strategy are the following:

• A centralized customer contact center designed to resolve 60% to 80% of customer requests, improve service levels and minimize call transfers
• Standardized customer service processes, which will ensure higher quality and more consistent customer service
• An integrated technology architecture to facilitate customer contact management with more consistent and complete data.
• Knowledge management tools, which will enable customer service agents to better respond to customer requests
• Enhanced reporting and analytics to provide management with more complete information that supports better decision making and operational planning