Government Agency: Colorado Department of Revenue

Solution or Platform Selected: RightNow On Demand CRM

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   Few business' seasonal "crunch times" are as severe as the Colorado Department of Revenue (CDOR). In the six weeks between early February and mid-March, CDOR may have to field 90 percent of its annual workload from its more than 2.1 million individual income tax filers. So it has to operate extremely efficiently—especially since it can only hire a few temporary staff to cope with the deluge. To make matters worse, tax-related questions can get pretty obscure. Are computer maintenance agreements taxable? How about goods purchased on an Indian reservation? These are tough questions for CDOR’s frontline personnel to answer and escalations could significantly delay responses to citizens and business owners. CDOR knew it needed a contact center platform that could help it get answers to people quickly—on the phone, via email, and over the web—and turned to RightNow Technologies on demand customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   With RightNow, CDOR can capture knowledge anywhere in the organization and apply it to citizen interactions as they occur on any communication channel—via phone, email, or web. This ensures the speed, accuracy, and consistency of the answers it provides regardless of the volume of questions. Because Colorado taxpayers get great service from CDOR via the web and email, they are more likely to use the other web-based services available. This is helping CDOR achieve operational efficiencies and be more responsive to service needs within its existing resource limitations. RightNow also provides CDOR with visibility into its citizen service activity with sophisticated reporting capabilities. This enables CDOR managers to understand the types of frequently asked questions and provide up to date information from the appropriate subject-matter experts. Consistent, precise answers are essential for CDOR to fulfill its mission, since tax laws are often subtle and misunderstandings can create problems for both the state and its constituents. “With RightNow, we can track a complex issue as we resolve it—and then capture the result so we don't have to go through that same process a second time,” says Ro Silva, public information and education manager at the Colorado DOR Taxpayer Service Division.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   Using RightNow, Colorado DOR consistently provides accurate and timely responses to taxpayer questions via the phone, email and the web. The department's web site now averages more than one million hits each year, and 90 percent of site visitors are able to quickly find answers to questions online, without having to contact the department. As a result, call center and e-mail volumes have been reduced by 45 percent, saving the department more than $5 million. “RightNow is an integral component of our overall strategy to better serve constituents and reduce our operational costs by leveraging the web," says Silva. "The efficiencies we've achieved with RightNow's help have been particularly critical in enabling us to cope with the onslaught of questions we get during our peak season.” The Colorado Department of Revenue (Colorado DOR) also won Nucleus Research's 2008 Technology ROI Award for realizing a return of 8,732 percent on its investment in RightNow's on demand customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The award honors companies whose deployment of IT solutions has produced a positive, bottom-line financial ROI.