Impact of Citizen Relationship Management (CRM) on Government: Evidence from U.S. Local Governments

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of Citizen Relationship Management (CRM) technology adoption on local governments in the United States. The purpose of the paper is to determine whether this technology has influenced organizational change. From the literature six factors appear to be important in the adoption of CRM, and these factors are examined through a survey of Chief Administrative Officers (CAO) in cities and counties that have adopted CRM systems. The results of the survey show that CRM had a strong impact on creating a more efficient, effective, and transparent governments. What was especially noteworthy from the survey results was that CAOs believed that CRM greatly improved communication with citizens. The challenges of CRM for local government were lack of funding and the difficulty of departments to relinquish control of their customer support systems. More basic technology is viewed as being the most effective in CRM systems. There is lack of integration of different service channels for most local governments such as the Website and phone. The implications of this survey are that CRM is having a broad impact on organizational change, but there is much more research that needs to be done on this understudied area of public administration.