Citizens are demanding local governments respond to their needs more quickly and effectively. To meet this increasing demand cities and counties across the world have begun to take advantage of technologies private sector organisations have been using for years to deliver exceptional service to their customers. Over the past few years cities have been realising the benefits of providing a single point of contact for their citizens.

With a central contact centre, citizens have a single point of contact to report broken streetlights, request services or even lodge a complaint about the neighbour’s noisy dog. To maximise your investment in customer service initiatives, local governments need to power the call centre with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application that gives call centre agents a single, comprehensive view of customer information and enables agents to log and track citizen requests through to resolution.

We created Merit CRM to do just that. Unlike other local government CRM products, Merit CRM did not begin as a departmental solution, slowly adding CRM functionality. We have been developing CRM products since 1996 and offer the most flexible and functionally-rich solution available today. We also understand the needs of local government - the solution is being used by hundreds of thousands of citizens in Australia. With our CRM expertise, and by leveraging the best practices of local governments across the globe, Merit has developed a product, Merit CRM, to specifically meet the needs of local government.

Local governments can better serve constituents and contain costs by more efficiently managing processes, including those for:

• Citizen maintenance requests such as pot holes and graffiti removal
• Citizen response systems/ correspondence management
• Case management
• Facilities management
• Operations
• Job costing
• Standard operating procedures
• Contract management
• Service level agreement management
• Customer inquiries
• Problem resolution/management
• Operations

With new and improved processes, your people work smarter and better. Merit CRM delivers a host of benefits that drive down expenses, such as:

• Automating paper-intensive, error-prone tasks
• Enabling more intelligent and faster exception resolution
• Promoting better staff collaboration with process consistency
• Providing real-time insight into inefficient stages of daily operations

For more detailed information about how Merit Technology can assist local government, visit the Merit CRM overview.