Caerphilly, now, Caerphilly…

The UK’s CRM upgrade continues. The council of lovely Caerphilly, Wales has announced their award of a £500,000 (approximately US $947,000) three-year contract to Northgate Information Solutions to upgrade its current customer services solution.

Under terms of the agreement, the Northgate Front Office CRM system, intelligent call routing, and knowledge management applications will be implemented; Northgate’s CallTouch and the RightNow knowledge management system will also be introduced. Front Office will be integrated with Caerphilly council’s extant back-office systems.

FrontOffice CRM seeks to assist the council in improving transactions with customers, tracking progress of queries, reviewing performance and streamlining business processes. CallTouch is designed to handle calls more efficiently through intelligent call routing, which matches caller demands to the best available answering resource, and CRM that enables an efficient response to a caller’s request.

RightNow captures information on a daily basis and “can be shared and used across the whole council in the form of an organic online knowledgebase of FAQs.” Phase one of the project has an announced completion date of March 2007 and will include services in environmental health, highways, public services and central recruitment; thirty employees will reportedly be using Front Office in this phase.

Front Office is currently used in UK customer service for over 8 million citizens, but this deal represents Northgate’s first in Wales.

Founded in 1969, Northgate Information Solutions employs 3,300, and other concomitant statistics are more impressive. In the UK, Northgate works with four out of five local authorities and every police force. Its systems are used in the management of over 1.5 million local authority and housing association properties; in the administration of more than £17 billion (approximately US $32.2 billion) in revenues and benefits; and in electoral administration systems covering over 18 million people.