A personalized and multi-channel relationship with citizens

After its experience with the institutional portal, it was natural for Roma Capitale to look ahead and set itself an even more ambitious goal: that of an institution that welcomes and supports its users, seeking to anticipate their needs and requirements. This ambition has been realized in defining the CRM Program: the CRM platform, designed to offer a single, shared vision of citizens among the institution’s different structures, and consequently offer uniform management of interactions through all contact channels, is the most important component of Roma Capitale’s strategy of continuous evolution. A new “one-click” service logic is actually based on CRM, and its adoption was a unique opportunity to reorganize and streamline the entire information architecture, a strategic starting point also to strengthen the sense of trust and belonging to the Roma “brand.” All under the banner of what some have rightly called “the digital renaissance” of the eternal city.

To design Roma Capitale’s digital transformation, explains Paola Di Maio, CRM & Brand Strategy Manager, “we started with context analysis: we analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the institution, looked at all our available human resources, and put ourselves in citizens’ shoes, setting benchmarks with projects in other cities. We reflected and made decisions as a company whose customer is the citizen, and for whom communications between the citizens and assistance services are a fundamental opportunity to gather information, recommendations, and even criticism.” The base line of the whole project is putting citizens at the center. Adopting Salesforce CRM was the decisive step in pursuing this goal through a single view of the user, integrating the database with all touch points in real time and allowing each user to manage their online profile and all related activities in a flexible way.

“CRM,” says Di Maio, “is at the heart of redesigning a system where 15 municipalities converge in a single administration, while fully maintaining their own specific features. In the past, each municipality has tried to shape and customize its operational models, in seeking to operate in the best possible way while also with respect to their specific contexts.” The project started before COVID, with the awareness that the digital tool was the main enabler of a transformation necessary to bring about a different way of doing administration. The first critical issue to be addressed was the accessibility of services through the platform. “It was a stress test to measure the quality of the project, the cornerstones of which remain synergy and interoperability,” Di Maio recalls. “It must be easier for citizens/users to contact Roma Capitale through the tools that are the easiest for them to use, and the more this relationship is digitalized, the more it reduces physical attendance at the counters.”

In order to identify the most suitable technological solution for Roma Capitale’s transformation model, a complete assessment was carried out to verify the critical points and the necessary resources, an in-depth software selection was conducted and possible providers were profiled. “We chose Salesforce due to its reputation in various industries, its flexibility, its scalability and its best practices. It was a long-term choice, which opens up the idea of bringing other administrations on board the project, since we are convinced that excellence can also be achieved in public administration with an appropriate internal change management process and an agile working methodology,” explains Di Maio.

With nearly 70 different digital services to manage, and as many legacy systems hosted in Roma Capitale’s data processing center, the risk of creating dispersion in terms of internal processes and getting lost in the navigation path (citizen side) was certainly one of the most obvious problems. To solve this problem, services have been organized by subject area, which alleviates the need to publish an enormous amount of information. Simplification is actually one of the cornerstones of the Roma Capitale project. Caprioli confirms: “There was a strong internal stance on how to effect change, streamline processes and achieve efficiency. CRM is the orchestrator of all the system’s functions: each point of contact is now profiled across the board with respect to their experience with the institution and, in doing so, there has been a quantum leap in quality, as there is total traceability of the user’s online activities. Service Cloud is the solution for handling peaks in incoming traffic and better managing the telephone contact center, avoiding any interruption to the system. As for digital engagement, on the other hand, the task of segmenting the services offered to citizens in a proactive way, enhancing their personal data, will be done on Marketing Cloud.”