Westminster City Council Drives Car Park Sales into the Cloud

Case Study

Westminster City Council is the local authority serving the heart of London. The City of Westminster stretches from Pimlico and Victoria in the south through the West End, Marylebone and Bayswater to Paddington and Queen’s Park in the north-west. It includes the capital's principal areas of government, shopping, entertainment and tourism and the headquarters of innumerable commercial and professional organizations together with extensive residential areas of all types.

The resident population now stands at approximately 247,000 but it is estimated that about 1 million people set foot in Westminster at some time during the day. There are also tens of thousands of people who live in the City for short-periods or on a part-time basis who are not included in the resident population.

The Council manages a large number of vehicle car park spaces, both in car parks and through street-based permit schemes. Through the city council’s Car Park Sales, Westminster citizens and visitors have the opportunity to book or rent a bay, either on a short-term basis or longer term lease. Until recently however, the city council’s Car Park Sales team had no efficient and effective means of managing existing or new customers for sales-related activity. For example, there was no single view of the customer and no efficient way to manage activities, such as emails, phone call details, events, meetings, hold documents, and presentations storage. Moreover, Car Park Sales had no means to view customer progress through the sales lifecycle, no way to run and monitor campaigns, and no way to create real-time pipeline and forecast summary or capture required data protection and informed consent validation.

According to Louis Barbe, web and CRM implementation manager at the city council, the problem went deeper. “Car Park Sales wanted to be proactive and to bring in much needed revenue via campaigns. We also wanted to be able to track campaign effectiveness in order to measure the return on each campaign,” he explains. “the city council also had a requirement to merge existing data into one view as there were multiple sources of data from various suppliers.”

Cost-effective, low risk sales management system

The city council evaluated its requirements against the pressure of time to market, budget constraints, and core sales functionality not normally associated with local authority business solutions. This suggested a strong sales and marketing customer relationship management (CRM) solution which would be cost effective to implement and which could be rolled out quickly.

A hosted, cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model aligned to the council’s infrastructure free IT strategy which offered a rapid, cost effective deployment. “A cloud solution answered all our questions,” says Louis. “offering a rapid delivery on a shared multi-tenant managed platform with reduced cost of ownership, time to market, and upfront implementation costs on a ‘pay per use’ cost model. This satisfied the expected lifetime of the requirement and business opportunity.”

So why salesforce.com? Research by Louis quickly concluded that salesforce.com was the market leader, with a best of breed Cloud Computing solution which was proven many times over in the market. Analysts such as Gartner also highlighted salesforce.com as achieving the highest placing on their Magic Quadrant as ‘leader’ and ‘visionary’―both in ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Deployed in only three weeks

With the decision made, the council partnered with a leading salesforce.com consultancy, Astadia U.K. Ltd, who provide a specialist skilled resource through their PowerStart package. This provides a set schedule of activities delivered over a fixed five man-day execution spread across a three week period.

In total, 57 individual requirements were specified for which the project successfully delivered on 91 percent. The remaining were either not deemed important or not directly in the domain of the council’s operation.

The council mapped a very specific business process which was not a classic ‘out of the box’ commercial sales-type scenario. This would usually be challenging with such a short, sharp engagement. However, careful preparation, and an agile iterative development process, ensured that the project maintained focus and that requirements were met through the adoption of standard functions within the Salesforce CRM solution. The council also invested significant effort into data cleansing. This made it possible to import more than 1,500 existing customers and the closed won opportunity history, together with more than 60,000 car parking sales leads.

“The project documented precisely what the ‘must have’ and ‘wish list’ features were. This enabled the Astadia consultant to focus on the key requirements. Also regular iterative reviews between the internal client and the consulting resource gave the council business owner both confidence in the progress toward the solution and involvement in the process,” says Louis.

A wealth of sales management functionality

Using the cloud computing model, the solution was delivered within three weeks and now proved a wealth of functionality.

• Lead Management, with auto conversion into Account, Contact, and Opportunity
• Opportunity Management―providing pipeline and control sales methodology, Product definition and pricing capture, with pre-sales workflow for after sales service
• Account Management―definition of account and relationship and activity management
• Contact Management―contact data capture, automated ‘informed consent’ workflow, full activity history, and channel management
• Case Management―allowing post sales and after sales support and incident case management control
• Data Migration―More than 60,000 records imported into Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities
• Integration―Google Maps for visual confirmation of locality to parking facility
• Outlook email/calendar integration ensure all correspondence is automatically logged against the customer using standard desktop email tools
• Dashboards and Reports―a wide array of management intelligence, driven in real-time for pipeline and opportunity management
• Campaign Management, with email trace and campaign performance monitoring, on deal conversion

Met sophisticated business requirements in very quick order

“The Sales Cloud offers the City Council a versatile and functionally intuitive search, edit, retrieve, report and management interface,” says Louis. “The system proved to be a very robust and functionally rich solution that delivers sophisticated business requirements in very quick order. This project has proven that the adoption of Cloud Computing, in its fullest form, works for the City Council and further use of the application is now being explored.

”The overall cost of this cloud-based sales management system was less than one percent of the total revenue derived from car parking in the Westminster borough. “We are exceptionally pleased that this project demanded such a small investment for such a large return. And it was all completed in three weeks,” says Louis.

So what’s next in the pipeline? Louis will also be demonstrating the solution to others in the City Council business units that have an immediate demand for sales-related services. The council is also investigating how the solution could be used to complement and/or integrate into other existing line of business solutions and other service requirements using the salesforce.com Service Cloud.

Results

Deployed in three weeks
CRM investment cost represented less than 1% of the total return
Provided car park sales teams with unified view of Account, Contact, and Opportunity management
Delivered 91% of project requirements at launch
Managed 1,500 existing customers and more than 60,000 car parking sales leads
Enabled post sales and after sales support and incident case management control
Integrated Google Maps location for visual confirmation of locality to parking facility
Captured the email channel in real-time for effective sales and after-sales management
Delivered management intelligence, driven in real-time for pipeline and opportunity management

Westminster City Council