CRM software is the glue that holds together public services in the English county of Staffordshire.

Staffordshire Connects is a large-scale project that started in 2003, will last for 10 years, and involves 10 authorities in the area. Using the programme, councils in the area set out to meet the UK government’s agenda to “e-enable” key services at a local level.

But the project, which has a budget of £2.5m, £1.8m of which comes from central government funds, is about more than just bringing services online. According to Mike Loveless, programme assurance and technical manager for Staffordshire Connects, the aim was also to bring significant improvements in in the way they handle customers.

Local authorities in England and Wales deliver 630 core services. The processes for these are often similar from council to council, but there might be little or no co-ordination of services on the ground across authority boundaries. Add to this the tied structure of local government outside the large urban conurbations, and it is easy to see how local people struggle to know where to turn.

In Staffordshire, for example, there are two or three tiers of local government, depending on exactly where you live: parish councils, district councils and Staffordshire County Council. But Stoke-on-Trent has its own unitary authority structure.

The thinking behind Staffordshire Connects sets out to do away with much of this complexity, or at least keep it out of sight of local people. “Reporting abandoned vehicles is a classic case because we have two or three tiers of authorities, leaving the public totally confused about who should be dealing with it,” says Mr Loveless.

The Staffordshire Connects partnership responded by installing a single CRM system to handle contacts with local people and businesses. The Oracle E-Business Suite software sits in front of the various councils’ CRM systems, providing a consistent front end for both self-service access via the internet and for call centre staff.

When someone comes to a council office for help or contacts the call centre, staff use the CRM system to route the task to the correct department. Some departments in some councils are connected directly into the CRM system but others are linked in simply by e-mail.

The partnership has even gone as far as to install BlackBerry and other handheld computers in the cabs of its refuse collection vehicles, so that routing information and special pick-up requests can go out over the air. The call centres can even e-mail the nearest refuse truck if a householder calls in to say that the crew have accidentally forgotten to empty their bin.

“It is very, very cost effective, because we can ask a driver to go back and that is much cheaper than sending the wagon out again the next day,” says Mr Loveless. The councils also use the CRM system to tell drivers about paid-for collections such as white goods or large pieces of rubbish.

A further advantage of the system is that staff can update their actions on the CRM database, so local tax payers can track the progress of any task. This is especially important for jobs that might need to be done by more than one council. “If you give us your e-mail address we can send you updates, or you can go through the history of the task online,” Mr Loveless explains.

The councils are benefiting, too. Some tasks are costing them up to a third less to carry out. Initial savings from the project came to £2m and the partnership expects to save its member councils £1.5m a year. About two-thirds of this sum is from efficiency gains, with £400,000 coming from the joint development and maintenance of IT systems.

None the less, making a success of such a large-scale project across 10 disparate organisations was not an easy task. “Management buy-in and a good business case, as well as performance management, are critical,” says Mr Loveless.

Similarly, it was not enough to install the CRM software and hope for the best. Staffordshire Connects began by carrying out independent market research in order go gauge how well member councils were doing in service delivery; in most cases, this was something that was unknown.

The second element was to design a set of standard processes, or tasks, for the CRM system. One of the reasons Staffordshire Connects chose the Oracle CRM system was because it was customised for public sector use, using terminology such as “properties” and “people” rather than products. Councils now use these templates to build their own interactive services. Staffordshire Moorlands District Council, for example, has 99 service requests online. The forms carry Staffordshire Moorlands’ logos, even though they are generated by the communal system.

But according to Mr Loveless, the most important step of all was to look critically at the business processes involved. Simply automating an inefficient process would not have been good enough. “We reviewed and revised the business processes first of all,” he says. “We did not want to automate rubbish.”

The effort does seem to be paying off, however. In Lichfield, for example, satisfaction with refuse collection is now 96 per cent, against 76 per cent before the project began. “Our customers are involuntary customers. They have to come to us for services,” Mr Loveless says. “So, we have a responsibility to deliver the best services, within the constraints of our budget.”