Live from the Gartner CRM Summit: CRM and Politics

Mark O’Malley, mayor of Baltimore, is a different kind of public official. For one thing, he refers to his constituents as “customers.”

That’s not an empty phrase, for Baltimore residents are now able to call a 311 number and get one-stop shopping for all city services. And data is being stored on any number of these transactions.

“Government is not a business, but government can be run in a businesslike manner,” O’Malley said during a luncheon speech at the Gartner CRM Summit in Baltimore.

Can an old-time municipality make its service departments more accountable? They sure can, according to O’Malley.

Key to the effort is the 311 number program, which is based on what John Kost, managing vice president of Gartner, calls “citizen service triage.” The objective is to automate as much as possible and have relatively low-level people handle high-volume calls that do not require great complexity.

Citizens now call a single number no matter what the problem. The volume falls in inverse proportion to the complexity. Generalists can answer most questions, using scripts. The more complicated calls are referred to specialists.

Of course, O’Malley wasn’t the first official to pursue a performance-based political system; he borrowed the idea from Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. But he saw how badly it was needed in Baltimore, a city with 646,000 residents and its share of urban problems.

“As the great Democrat Adlai Stevenson said, ‘Bad administration will kill good policy every single time,” he said.

O’Malley admitted that the old system of administering city services was dysfunctional. For example, the city had a sheet with all the help numbers listed. “If you had rats, you’d look under ‘R,” he said. “If it was a pothole, you’d look under ‘P.”

Worse yet, when people called up, “they weren’t always treated very well on the other end of the line,” O’Malley continued. Often, a rude field employee would be “brought inside where we could keep an eye on him,” he joked.

But that’s only one part of the initiative. In addition, Baltimore now uses “an army of information the way businesses have to do every day,” according to O’Malley. Case in point: The use of data to determine allocation of resources.

“In the old patronage system of government, if we got 200 new police officers from a grant, we’d bring in the councilmen and say, ‘Congratulations, each of you has 200 officers divided by six,’ he said.

Now the city conducts analysis deploys the officers where they are really needed.

Then there’s the function of measuring what Kost calls “political ROI.” O’Malley’s staff is relentless in setting goals, analyzing success and following up.

In the past, a budget the size of a phone directory “masqueraded as our performance measurement,” he said. “We now have the guts to set goals. Sometimes we don’ t always hit them.”

What’s the success rate?

The call center has handled 1.2 million calls since it opened. But that isn’t all. In 1986, there were 9,500 employees (not counting, police, teachers and firefighters). Now there are 3,500. In addition, the city has cut its illegal dumping backlog in half.

None of this has been easy to achieve. Kost advises most jurisdictions, many of which are trapped in outdated legacy systems, to start slowly. “This can not be done as a Big Bang,” he said.

Nevertheless, Gartner expects government to be the main customer for CRM systems within a few years. And that trend has already started.

Colorado, for example, has closed its brick-and-mortar unemployment centers and now has recipients signing up by phone or online. Moreover, they get to interact with a college-education person who can refer them to state resources. Then there’s Arizona.

“Arizona is in deep financial trouble,” Kost said. “So they’re doing CRM in the tax department-not because they can afford it, but because it’s politically important to do.

As for O’Malley, the 311 initiative may not have been the reason he was reelected last year by a wide majority. But it didn’t hurt.