Government. Despite – and perhaps because of – being one of the oldest institutions in the world, its processes and user experience is known for being manual, outdated, and slow. Why? Much of it is centered around – you guessed it – funding. Federal agencies spend 70% of their IT budgets simply maintaining outdated systems, and only 30% goes toward developing new systems. These new system projects were only successful 6.4% of the time, often because of the size and risk associated with a public sector IT project.
A running theme in these projects is decreasing cost and increasing efficiency, which is a familiar concept to any industry or business. By taking outdated legacy systems and manual processes and putting them into a cloud solution like Salesforce, public sector agencies can use the assets and resources they currently have, and make them go farther.
Saleforce CRM has been used in amazing government projects and has been seeing amazing results:
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The city of Washington, DC transformed the 311 platform from phone to social media to increase support efficiency
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Michigan Health Information Network uses Sales Cloud to track connections between healthcare providers to facilitate care-coordination fo prescription medications
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Wyoming built an integrated application library, eliminating manual entry and improving employee efficiency and happiness
Redefining the government experience is where Salesforce excels; the ease of set up, the ease of continued maintenance, and the infinite customization opportunities allows any project to find a home on its platform. It’s a perfect fit for constituent outreach with integration into Communities and self-service, and developing apps for departmental use cases makes it customized to fit any need. The most exciting use case for Salesforce is digitizing manual and paper processes – a win for both the applicant and the organization who has to review & take action on the application. On top of it all is a powerful analytics and reporting capabilities allow you to view trends happening real-time, track costs associated to programs, and track KPIs associated to employee efficiency.
It all comes down to the human experience – as citizens, we want our voice to be heard, and we want to communicate on the platforms we use the most. Those platforms – cell phones, tablets, laptops – all have one thing in common: they’re mobile. We’re an on-the-go society who’s time is valuable. We want to fill out applications that pre-fill data that source should already have like our name, address, and social security number. We want to be able to report graffiti in our neighborhood by taking a picture of it and having the geo-location feature on our phones utilized to notify city maintenance where to come clean it up. Easy, efficient, smart: that’s how public sector SHOULD work.
Here’s hoping those in the public sector can see the value in modernizing their processes to accommodate the revolution of digital.