Government Agency: The Environmental Protection Agency Office of Environmental Information

Solution or Platform Selected: RightNow On Demand CRM

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   The EPA has a highly complex mission. In order to protect human health and the environment across the United States, the agency must address a wide variety of issues—ranging from regulation of vehicle emissions and the proper labeling of pesticides to the protection of wetlands and acid rain monitoring. However, like every other agency, it has limited resources to fulfill its critical mission. So it must do everything possible to operate at maximum efficiency. At the same time, the EPA is under increasing pressure to communicate effectively with the general public. While its primary mission is regulatory, it’s also important for the EPA to keep citizens and businesses informed about its regulations, programs, findings, and successes. That ability to communicate has been hindered on two fronts. First, with roughly 90,000 email messages coming in every month, the EPA’s response capacity was being overwhelmed. The agency developed a backlog of inquiries and was simply diverting too much staff time to handling messages every day. Second, two of its contact centers were being de-funded. So the agency needed a better way to manage the ever-growing volume of questions it was receiving.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   Based on agency management interviews, it was clear the EPA needed a more automated system for handling email and providing self-service on its website. Also the system would have to be easy for site visitors to use and for the agency to administer. Another important issue for the agency was de-centralization. The only way EPA could successfully implement a self-service online knowledge base for the whole agency would be if each department could manage its own content—even though the interfaces would have a standard EPA ‘look and feel’. EPA needed something that would allow them to maintain both distributed content management and centralized administration. RightNow was the best choice for the EPA. It provided the ease-of-use the agency needed for both site visitors and internal users, as well as the ability to appropriately balance centralized and de-centralized control. Its email management capabilities would greatly ease the routing and tracking of inquiries across the EPA’s departments. And RightNow’s hosted delivery model would speed deployment while eliminating all the upfront and lifecycle costs associated with conventional solutions. EPA saw in RightNow a company with lots of previous success in meeting the needs of large federal agencies.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   Within months, EPA deployed a pilot program that proved the technology and drove internal consensus for adoption across the agency. With the de-funding of the contact centers, EPA had a system in place that would enable it to continue providing quality service, reduce emails by 70%, and improve agency efficiency. Also by providing insight into user’s questions, RightNow enables the EPA to continuously improve the relevance of its knowledge base—boosting effectiveness of its email replies and self-service answers. For example, EPA noticed an increase in questions regarding “black mold.” By adding appropriate content to its knowledge base, it was able to answer these questions via self-service and eliminate several hundred emails from its workload. EPA’s RightNow system also makes it easier for staff members in each department to forward email to each other with an issue outside their domain of expertise. Plus, the system continues to track the progress of those emails, so that they never get lost in the shuffle. In addition, EPA can use RightNow to pinpoint geographic areas or industries that are really struggling with a particular issue, and take steps to respond accordingly. These insights help the agency better respond to the country’s environmental needs.