Microsoft UK Public Sector - Efficiency - Kent F&RS doubles home safety visits with Microsoft CRM

The Kent Fire and Rescue Service is just one of many public sector agencies learning that CRM has as many applications in the public sector as in large corporations. As Kim Thomas finds out, thanks to CRM, Kent’s firemen are doubling their annual quota of home safety checks.

In the private sector, customer relationship management (CRM) software can be a great tool for targeting customers more effectively, providing tailored services and maintaining good relationships with your most valued clients. But CRM has much to offer the public sector too. As the Kent Fire and Rescue Service has discovered, it can bring huge gains in efficiency and a better relationship with the public.

An important part of the organisation’s work is to offer advice to the public about fire safety and prevention, and since 2000 this has included carrying out visits to people’s homes in order to identify fire risks and fit smoke alarms.

While the visits proved valuable, the management of the programme left a lot to be desired. Members of a fire station would attend public events such as fetes and fairs and gather the names of people interested in having a home safety visit. When there was a quiet moment in the station, someone would call the first householder and make arrangements to carry out the visit that day. If the householder was unavailable, they would call the next person on the list. “It was highly inefficient”, explains Jon Chapman, community safety development manager: “If you were name number 500, there was a good chance that you never got a call.”

To make matters worse, each of the 22 fire stations managed their home visits separately, so if a resident wanted to cancel their home visit, they wouldn’t necessarily know which station to call – and the fire service had 36 different numbers they could choose from. “We would get phone calls at headquarters with members of the public saying ‘Someone’s coming to see me today, but I’ve got to rush to hospital and I can’t make it,’” says Chapman. “And we had no way of knowing who was due to do that visit, let alone contact them and say ‘This individual can’t make it.’”

The system for keeping records of home visits was also inefficient. A safety officer would carry out a visit, fill in a paper risk assessment form and then send it to an administrative office, where it would then be entered onto a computer. But because forms sometimes got lost, and there were several different administrative teams entering the data, the information on the system was often incomplete, inconsistent or inaccurate. Chapman sums up: “From a data capture point of view, there were lots of areas for improvement; from a delivery point of view, there were lots of areas for improvement; and from a customer service point of view, there were lots of areas for improvement.”

The Service turned to Microsoft partner Optevia to address the issue. The choice of Microsoft Dynamics CRM was an easy one to make, says Chapman, because the fire service was already running Microsoft products on its network: “It works with our existing infrastructure, which meant we wouldn’t have to worry about lots of back end integration. And it was a very good product, which with a little customisation met our requirements quite easily.”

The project took only seven months to implement, and provided Kent Fire and Rescue Service with a much more efficient way of handling their customer relationships. The service now has an 0800 number, which acts as a single point of contact for members of the public who want to arrange a home visit. The number is manned by four customer service advisers who book in the home visit from the appropriate fire station. Plus, members of the public who prefer to request an appointment electronically may do so by email or via the national E-fire portal. All this is integrated with the Dynamics CRM system, so that the scheduling can be carried out smoothly.

Each station provides advance notice of their availability, so it is easy to arrange a time that is convenient both for the station and the resident, says Chapman: “What this means for the station is that instead of having to do the collection and phoning, they just get a list of jobs and they work through that list, which says ‘On this day, you need to be at this address, within this time zone, for a visit.’”

Risk assessment forms are generated by Microsoft Dynamics CRM, with details like names and addresses automatically filled out. When the assessment has been completed, the officer enters the data directly into the CRM system, a process that takes about 30 seconds. The results of the visit are then automatically tagged to the customer record.

After implementation of the CRM system the efficiency of the team of dedicated home safety check officers increased by 100%, says Chapman: “They didn’t have to do any phoning, and they didn’t have to do any paperwork – they just had to enter the results.” The improvement is reflected in the number of home visits carried out: the highest number of visits the service had made in a single year before implementation was 8,000; the target for the coming year is 16,000.

A recent upgrade from Dynamics CRM version 3 to version 4 has enabled the service to make further improvements, particularly in the way it handles referrals to vulnerable people, such as those who are deaf or elderly. In those cases, a pre-determined set of rules makes sure that the referral is dealt with on the same day and that, if someone is unavailable, another call is made within a fixed period of time.

For the private sector, the test of success is whether the implementation has improved profits. For Kent, it’s a much harder calculation to make. The more efficient the service becomes, the more it costs – smoke alarms are expensive. But Chapman believes that the service has saved lives, both by preventing fires and by detecting fires: “We’ve had several instances where families have got out of properties because our smoke alarms have alerted them. In many of these cases, the occupants in question would very likely have been overcome by smoke if they hadn’t been alerted by alarms fitted as part of the Home Safety Visit.”

Chapman says that one of the great benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is its flexibility and scalability – the organisation is continually finding new ways of using it, such as creating reports to identify high-risk areas, or using the workflow element to contact external agencies about customers with special needs. “We quite quickly found ways of improving it, which I think is a testament to the product, because you’re not locked down to a single way of working,” he says.

As a result, he adds, the organisation is refining the use of the application to improve the service still further: “We are looking at integrating it with other databases in our organisation, to give us yet more joined-up delivery. We’ve had some massive gains in Kent, but now we’re going to look hard at what the data is telling us and focus our resources more intensively in a smaller number of places instead of a blanket approach.”

Improving performance in smaller organisations with CRM

Kim Thomas is a freelance journalist, who specialises in writing about technology, business and education. Her clients include the Financial Times, the Economist Intelligence Unit and The Guardian as well as a number of B2B publications.