Editorial

Making CRM Work For The Public Sector: An Upcoming On-Air Real World Use Case

An upcoming special webinar will demonstrate how non-Departmental agency Innovate UK has worked with a firm it contracted with off G8 to improve the way it works with customer data

Posted 10 January 2017 by Gary Flood


A unified view of the citizen digital services user.

Making Customer Relationship Management work for the public sector.

Getting the most out of an engagement with a new-to-you supplier you partner with off The Digital Marketplace.

We think those are pretty interesting problems – and very much at the heart of what many UK public sector organisations are dealing with right now.

If you agree, then on Tuesday, January 31st, you need to head on over to a special webinar being hosted by public sector tech supplier Methods Digital.

That’s because the event – which will be no more than 30 minutes long and at lunchtime, to minimise any interference in your schedule – is all about these very issues. Even better: it’s being co-presented by an actual public sector user that’s worked its way through them.

That user is the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, the executive non-departmental public body that works to find and drive the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy.

The Swindon-based organisation has committed over £1.8bn to innovation, matched by a similar amount in partner and business funding, helping over 7,600 organisations with projects that are believed to have added more than ten times that, £11.5bn, back to the UK economy, creating 55,000 extra new jobs along the way.

What’s interesting about Innovate UK when it comes to IT is that it had been struggling, despite all this success, with challenges many parts of the public sector will find familiar.

These included struggles with the limitations of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that was holding it back from getting a truly unified view of its many customers and applicant SMEs and entrepeneurs, for example.

It was also anxious to find a better way to help its team deal with the many enquiries it gets – as many as 45,000 calls or emails per year.

To move to a truly integrated, digital service model, Innovate UK’s been working with a firm called Methods Digital to overcome these issues.

Methods Digital is a consultancy with deep expertise with the Salesforce cloud-delivered CRM system, and which has worked with other public sector bodies facing similar challenges to Innovate UK, like Ofcom, the ONS, and the Government Digital Service.

On the 31st, David Biden, Methods Digital’s ‎Salesforce/FinancialForce Director is going to walk through exactly what his team was able to do for Innovate UK with a key stakeholder at the latter – the organisation’s Customer Services Manager, Nicole Pethybridge.

That means that anyone who tunes in to the webinar will get a unique chance to understand what’s effectively a real-life business case study of CRM in the public sector.

It’s also going to be a great chance to find out about working with a cloud application, about project management, about the use of Agile – and about how to work with the kind of smaller, nimbler suppliers you get off the Digital Marketplace.

As a result of all these factors, ThinkDigitalPartners thinks this is a very interesting opportunity, and we’re recommending it to our readers.

If you agree, go here to complete the simple registration process for this free event.

We think you will.

And that you’ll also get a lot out of this 30 minutes, too.