The Correspondence Management Conundrum – Part 3

Avtex Helps Public Sector Agencies Manage High Volume Citizen Interactions

Choosing the Right CMS System for Your Agency’s Unique Needs

The wide range of correspondence and customer relationship management solutions available on the market can make it challenging to identify the best fit for your organization. There are some key factors to consider, however, that may help you make an informed decision.

Choose a correspondence management solution that:

• Provides exceptional service and user experience. You need a platform that is consistent across familiar systems, like the Microsoft Cloud. Avtex offers CMS solutions that integrate with productivity and collaboration tools that the agency already has in place, allowing employees to easily get up to speed learning the technology.
• Maintains accountability and transparency with more visibility on requests. Citizens expect consistency with responses to their inquiries. Regardless of whether a request is made through a phone call, email or web portal, an efficient CMS can help agencies handle requests consistently by providing all employees with a view of where requests are in the correspondence process and what has been said on the topic at hand. Additionally, constituents have the ability to track progress made on their requests.
• Complies with federal regulations. Government agencies must make security the forefront of what modern technology adheres to. A CMS solution offers the ability to integrate with systems familiar to agency employees while still leveraging advantages of the cloud. Additionally, a CMS can accomplish this all while maintaining compliance with government wide laws and regulations.
• Maintains a golden record: This is a unified data set that maintains and tracks all information coming from correspondence. Internally, employees can also track entities and identify the original person who submitted the request. Additionally, a golden record maintains that there is only one source of data for all of this information.
• Offers a digital presence: This refers to a digital platform that, from the agency perspective, allows ongoing access to either the status or updates that need to be made for the requests or attachments that are sent back and forth. This translates to agencies getting more information expeditiously because they are getting it from one source of data.
• Streamlines individualized engagement: This means an increasing amount of engagement per request through automation. A CMS solution should have tools that increase the level of engagement so as to offload effort from staff and other existing resources. To enhance citizen experiences, individualized engagement also helps personalize interactions with each correspondent.

In addition to these choosing a solution with these integral features, it is important to:

Think differently – Citizens’ personal interactions with private companies form their expectations with government agencies. Agencies need to rethink the way they look at correspondence management and customer service. Citizens are looking for seamless experiences, which requires agencies to deliver information consistently and in a personalized manner. The more consistent and responsive agencies can be, the more effective they’ll be in the eyes of citizens.

Treat technology as a way to support positive outcomes – Government can sometimes shy away from new technologies because of fear of lack of security, user difficulty trying to learn new gadgets and applications, timely migration processes and high costs. Starting with the process and policies in your agency, however, can help make sense of what you’re trying to achieve. Then you can choose technologies and programs accordingly.

Here's more insight into the challenges associated with correspondence management and they ways Avtex solves them: