Citizen portals
With Microsoft SharePoint Server, governments can create a central online resource where citizens can address a wide variety of needs at their convenience.
These include finding information about services and events; applying for permits, jobs, and licenses; paying bills and fines; logging reports and requests; and expressing opinions and interacting with policymakers.
Additionally, Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps agencies organize, store, and track electronic communications from citizens. With a comprehensive trail, services' outreach awareness can be improved, specific needs of groups within the community can be met, costs can be lowered, and citizen satisfaction can be increased. Citizens can also have the flexibility of filing applications and obtaining services using their PCs, PDAs, or phones.
Contact centers
Once you provide a platform that improves citizens' ability to interact with the government, you will need a robust solution to help your workers respond quickly to citizen needs.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps improve citizens' ability to contact your agency and cut your response time by integrating your call center, routing, and CRM. The faster your response, the greater value your agency can deliver to the communities you serve.
You can also use electronic tools, such as interactive voice response (IVR) in combination with contact-center agents to speed issue resolution of phone inquiries. Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365 give knowledge workers the ability to work within Microsoft Office Outlook to review prior contacts and update records when responding to email requests. This enables your organization to take advantage of a reporting dashboard to sort and report incidents by contact type (web, phone, or email) or by case type, case severity, or other key data to help ensure timely service.
Citizen mobile applications
The way citizens interact with government agencies is changing rapidly. Today, mobile applications make it easier for citizens to report on community concerns, receive government feedback on progress, and help save the government money. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM in combination with .NET and Windows Azure, governments can now improve tracking and help ensure timely responsiveness to businesses, citizens, and their requests. And, they can even help enable citizens to create and track cases and search knowledge bases for information potentially resulting in improved service quality and increased citizen satisfaction.
Citizen identity
With all of this information sharing and data access to government sites, security is more necessary than ever. As government services move to cheaper online channels, efficiencies stem from using one or more Identity Providers as a shared service rather than building those efficiencies repetitively into each application. Trust is built by applying common definitions of multiple identity assurance levels, and allowing for the diversity of external Identity Providers with the appropriate authentication methods for each level.
Governments can stimulate citizen uptake based on online trust frameworks, by putting users in control of their personal data, by managing their minimal disclosure of personal data for each service, and by providing a consistent user experience during the log-in process. For your developers, this means simplification will come from standards-based identity federation, allowing flexibility for future architectural changes, and to move services between on-premises and the cloud.
Citizen service apps
What if you could create and maintain a clear picture of citizen interactions from first contact through service fulfillment? With Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Windows Azure, you can.
Government agencies can now provide employees and citizens with mobile access to information, along with a way to submit information 24 hours per day by tightly integrating citizen relationship management with internal and external portals.
Governments can provide access on almost any mobile device to case workers in the field enabling them to enter information into the system once, so they can spend more time focusing at their primary tasks. In fact, case workers can even coordinate interactions between agencies to streamline and improve case management for a particular citizen. Additionally, governments can improve tracking and transparency by using Microsoft Office applications, such as Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Word, to create reports that help ensure compliance.
Social engagement
Using technologies such as CRM Online, Azure, SharePoint 2010, and InfoPath Forms Server, Microsoft can help governments seamlessly integrate third-party social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube into public portals to encourage citizen collaboration.
This functionality allows groups of citizens to create complete social mash-ups and leverage social media tools to gain presence in the community so governments can support environmental benefits, such as reducing paper use while more efficiently and reliably streamlining the collaborative processes as part of the workflows.
