Government Agency: U.S. Department of the Treasury - Federal Consulting Group

Solution or Platform Selected: Salesforce.com CRM

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   The Performance Measurement and Customer Satisfaction team in the Federal Consulting Group, a franchise of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, required a system to more effectively track and manage agreements with federal agencies. After its customer base grew and it acquired more staff, the team found it had outgrown its paper-based and Microsoft Excel tracking systems. It grew increasingly difficult to track customer contact information and to know which agreements were assigned to each customer. The team required an easy-to-use, readily accessible CRM solution that would be quick and easy to implement.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   With the help of the Salesforce CRM tutorial, the team implemented Salesforce CRM Group Edition by three people in less than a month. Now, agreements with different agencies are specified in Salesforce CRM as "opportunities"; and changes to an agreement, such as price or service type, are entered as modifications to the opportunity. Additionally, automated alerts along with reports indicate when agreements are coming to a close. Communications with customers are logged in activity history and matched to the specific opportunity. FCG is able to self-administer customized fields that store important agreement-specific information for easy access. FCG now has the ability to run realtime pipeline reports, track what agreements are pending, as well as what stage they are at in the process.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   Now, having one central location of customer agreements puts everyone on the same page, streamlining productivity and increasing knowledge sharing. All customer contact information is stored in Salesforce CRM, significantly reducing the time needed to find a telephone number or email address. Customers are now contacted before agreements end, ensuring no loss of business. The team recently upgraded from Salesforce CRM Group Edition to Salesforce CRM Professional Edition to enable integration with Lotus Notes. Other areas of FCG are being added to Salesforce CRM, which will store agreements and customer contacts from all business lines in one centralized location.