**Fairfax County Government**

**Customer Relationship Management: Staff Productivity and\
Efficiencies/Customer Responsiveness**

*by Alexis Prince,*

## Department of Information Technology

*Fairfax County Government, Fairfax, Virginia*

There has been a paradigm shift over the last decade in the way the
Fairfax County Government conducts business. The number of web based
transactions, phone calls, e-mails and faxes to the County increased
while the number of walk-ins decreased as resident and business
expectations for convenient customer service and accurate information
continued to grow. In response to these changes, Fairfax County has
successfully entered into the world of customer relationship management
technology (CRM), resulting in better customer responsiveness and
improved internal efficiencies.

Fairfax County utilizes the Web enabled system '*Intranet Quorum' (IQ),*
which replaced several obsolete custom applications. This Web-enabled
solution provides a robust consistent foundation for managing customer
relationships. A comprehensive and flexible workflow capability provides
the tools needed to deliver strong citizen service and improved business
processes. This platform has become the County's standard for tracking
contacts and resolutions and allows multiple agencies to use the system
under an enterprise approach. IQ provides data consolidation, integrated
management of correspondence, proactive messaging to constituents, case
management, constituent research and access of historical and current
data, on-line problem reporting via the web, downloading of data from
externally related systems directly into IQ, imaging, workflow and other
time saving functions.

County employees have experienced significant improvement in
productivity and efficiency by conducting business proactively and
collating the results of interactions and services. This allows staff
the opportunity to be more involved in the mission and goals of their
agencies and to better respond to constituent needs. Opportunities for
staff to participate in telecommuting and flextime work hours have
dramatically increased.

Users of CRM include the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and the
Office of County Executive, who use the tool to record, route, and
manage interactions with constituents and organizations \-- including
integrated management of correspondence, visits, meetings, tracking
letters and scanned documents linked to the constituent's correspondence
history, and the ability to target common interests and issues for
analysis and recommendations. Staff efficiencies include a reduction in
the amount of time spent researching the status of constituent contacts
and efficient tracking and reporting on cases geographically throughout
the county. Staff productivity increases have also occurred with
improved service delivery to constituents due to proactive notifications
concerning local matters of interest and system integration with other
technologies such as imaging that improves the staff's ability to find
and retrieve documents quickly and easily.

The Office of the County Executive also uses the Legislative Tracking
Monitor application in 30 County agencies to immediately monitor,
review, respond and track state legislation while the Virginia General
Assembly is in session. Staff efficiencies include links to legislative
bill information on the Virginia State Web site as well as the automated
download of bill information from the Commonwealth's Legislative
Information System into the County's CRM system, eliminating the need
for a legislative aid to manually perform the data entry task. This
further enables the County staff to search quickly and accurately for
current status of bills and comments while spending more time analyzing
the data.

The Clerk to the Board of Supervisors also uses the Boards and
Commissions module to maintain a complete correspondence history of
contacts, and track nominations and appointments to boards, authorities
and committees. Staff efficiencies include consolidated management of
essential information as well as the ability to scan and attach relevant
documents.

The Consumer Protection Division uses CRM for Complaint Tracking,
License Administration and Taxicab Inspections. The system enables staff
to rapidly open and begin investigating cases. By expediting the
administrative components of case investigations the initial response
time has been reduced resulting in earlier detection of consumer
protection violations. The historical research required to discern if
businesses are repeat offenders and, if so, how past cases were resolved
is now expedited. The ability to cross-reference cases between
investigators allows staff to share online information pertaining to the
same or similar consumer protection violations and facilitates
collaboration between investigators on complaints and resolution
techniques. The system also allows citizens to access complaint
histories of businesses online in order to research and better determine
the pros and cons of doing business with those merchants.

The Office of Public Affairs has achieved efficiencies by replacing
selected manual business processes, including tracking requests for
interviews, publications and media documents, elimination of the
cumbersome process of manually tracking constituent requests and a more
efficient means of routing and tracking mandated Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) requests.

The Human Rights Commission uses the system to create, track and report
on case workflows allowing the investigators to meet multiple
requirements quickly. Efficiencies include streamlining complex
discrimination processes and addressing privacy concerns for
investigators and conciliators.

The Fairfax County Government continues to assess business processes to
maximize the opportunities for increased use of CRM. Future enhancements
include adding workflow routing functionality based on subject matter
across County agencies. The individual workflows will be integrated by
the automatic importing of electronic messages or other communications
and routed to appropriate staff members. Live help using a Web
interface, such as instant messaging, will give users another method for
receiving real-time support, and will incorporate multi-media and other
forms of digital and wireless communications to improve the user
experience. Other modules planned include an Internet Mail Agent to
manage and filter electronic mail, and a centralized repository of data
to allow call taker analysts to have the most complete information about
customer issues.

The ultimate goal with CRM is to provide the County with an
enterprise-wide full function distributed Constituent Contact Center
solution that offers citizens virtual one-stop customer service within
the County by organizing the tracking and monitoring of communications,
cases, contacts, events and complaints. Over time, Enterprise CRM
technology and the Constituent Contact Center will enhance citizens'
confidence in County government by ensuring access to the widest range
of information and building a comprehensive knowledge base for call
taker analysts to assist citizens.

*For more information, contact Alexis Prince, Department of Information
Technology, Fairfax County Government at
<alexis.prince@fairfaxcounty.gov>.*