|
A new study by Accenture has revealed that although many governments have no plans to implement certain CRM (customer relationship management) techniques on-line, Ireland has made progress in these areas. "I know of two Irish government agencies using segmentation and at least two that are using customer insight," Sean Shine, partner at Accenture, told ElectricNews.Net.
Accenture surveyed senior-level government managers from 11 countries including Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Although 75 percent of respondents expressed confidence in CRM's applicability to government, only 20 percent of respondents said they plan to develop the means to gain better insight into customer needs and only seven percent of agencies said they would develop customer segmentation.
Both customer insight and segmentation, which Accenture defines as a key CRM technique that enables organisations to gain greater insight into their customers and to tailor services to meet individual needs, have already been deployed in a few unnamed agencies in Ireland.
Shine said that one of Ireland's advantages in rolling out e-government with better CRM is its relatively small size. "Ireland has a great advantage over other countries because it is very small and therefore it can be much more nimble. Also in my experience in working with them, senior Irish government officials are fairly 'can do' in their approach."
This "can do" attitude is crucial in overcoming what was found to be the biggest barrier to implementing CRM in e-government services. Survey respondents identified bureaucracy and technology as the two greatest obstacles to further CRM adoption in government. But technology issues can spell trouble for government projects.
"We found that governments are open to new technologies but there is an issue with large scale projects. They can go off the rails because they can be beasts to manage," warned Shine.
Accenture has built the Revenue Commissioners' Revenue On-Line Service (ROS), which launched new services at the end of September including allowing self-employed individuals to file their income tax returns and pay their tax over the Internet. A similar service for corporation tax is expected to be live at the end of this month.
Accenture is at http://www.accenture.ie.
|
