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Sefton Mayrise CRM integration |
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 Sefton Council is boosting services to almost 300,000 residents with a new contact centre that connects electronically to the council’s computer databases.
Using the latest web technology, the council is linking its MAYRISE management systems to the councils contact centre that handles up to 2000 calls a day.
The first phase sees integration of MAYRISE refuse collection and street cleaning systems with the council’s CRM, Northgate Front Office. This allows contact centre staff to instantly access live records when taking calls. A second phase will provide access to MAYRISE street lighting and highways information.
Sefton stretches from Bootle to Southport and is home to Aintree Racecourse and Seaforth Container Port. In the past, Sefton had hundreds of council buildings offering different services spread across the borough and there were about 200 individual telephone numbers that residents could call. Service delivery is also complicated by the geography of the region. Sefton stretches 22 miles along the Merseyside coastline from Bootle in the south to Southport in the north. The region has a mix of industry and commerce coupled with a seaside resort and agricultural areas.
The council sees investment in IT as crucial to modernising government and improving services. “The key is to make it easy for our citizens to contact us and make it easy for them to get the information they need. Making as much possible via the web is important, but the contact centre and a new one stop shop provide the essential personal touch. The CRM integration, which makes information readily available when taking calls, is witness to the importance of IT to delivering better services” says Carl Ramsbottom, Head of Service Delivery.
“The real objective is to get as many calls as possible handled first time. That means arming contact centre staff with all the information they need. Where suppliers have been open and cooperative we have been able to integrate. The seamless link between Front Office and MAYRISE systems is exactly the type of development that is needed to really improve services. We hope other system suppliers will soon also offer such easy XML-based integration tools” continues Ramsbottom.
As well as Northgate’s CRM, MAYRISE and other key back office systems from Anite and Flare, Sefton are investing in other state-of-the-art technology to improve services. These include CallPlus telephone management technology from MacFarlane which route calls automatically to different groups, and in the near future the adoption of mobile smartphones that link directly to central information systems so service can be delivered better in the community.
The job of managing integration between different systems is the work of Information Services IT specialist Kevin Baines. “The first challenge is getting together all the customer centric databases and building common central dataset such as NLPG. Then there is a need to interchange data but it is never straightforward as there are big differences in the way different departments work and how they refer to things. Certainly we have learnt that central systems need to be entity based, not property or street based, as an incident such as a parking ticket could be issued anywhere” he explains.
Integration between systems uses a number of technologies including screen scrape, XML and potentially expensive middleware. “The type of XML integration offered by Mayrise is great for getting information in and out of the CRM and we believe it is the best way forward for most suppliers. Middleware is also very appealing as it provides a central repository that all data flows through so data can be shared more easily, but it is very expensive and hard to cost justify” comments Bains.
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