Customer Relationship Management System

The Vendor is required to provide customer relationship management system (CRM), researching the market for CRM technology providers, capable of consolidating customer data, streamlining customer-facing operations, enhancing service performance, and strengthening cross-department collaboration.
- This solution should be:
•    Customer centric, intuitive, and easy to use. 
•    Focused on user experience and provides a best practice interface for internal and external users. 
•    A seamless experience across multiple platforms delivering consistent and personalized service anytime and anywhere. 
•    Omni channel and support efficient and effective management of customer service interactions across, but not limited, to in-person and counter, phone, email, web, SMS, and social media.
- CRM platform should have a set of core capabilities following the stated guiding principles:
•    The proposed CRM for this solution should be highly modularized, configurable from the functional perspective. 
•    The proposed CRM solution should be fit for purpose to support the varying maturity level of the organizations. 
•    Some would require basic functionalities, while some of them require medium and others require advanced functionalities. 
•    Costing is an important consideration and budgets vary across organizations. 
•    Modularizing and offering the needed fit for purpose is an important requirement. 
•    Minimum customization and maximum use of out of the box (OOTB) capabilities 
•    The licensing requirement should be factored in when considering the modularized solution approach. 
•    The platform must meet modern information security standards and requirements and comply with different data protection and data sovereignty laws.
- Anticipated solution requirements
•    All standard and core customer relationship management functionality
•    Ability to support phased deployment (foundational CRM → advanced workflows → analytics → AI)
•    Built-in tools for configuration lifecycle management, allowing each municipality to version, test, and promote configuration changes independently that will bring value to one but not needed for the other (workflow templates, standards etc.)
•    A robust knowledge base and ability to integrate with existing knowledge bases (e.g., confluence)
•    Field service functionality (e.g., service orders, job status)
•    Automatic tagging of request types with retention categories
•    Built in and customizable workflows
o    Supports a shared, foundational template for all service requests and work orders (common across the region + municipalities), while allowing municipality-specific and service-specific variations. 
o    When the ownership of a request is determined (region vs. Municipality), the system should automatically load the correct field set, including mandatory vs. Optional fields
•    Workflow automation or predictive routing
•    Ability to integrate with the existing systems
•    Ability to develop integrations with any API enabled GIS, asset management platforms, work management platforms, etc.
•    Geo-tagging and integration with GIS systems
•    A customer portal for inquiries and service requests (unauthenticated and authenticated)
•    Self service capabilities, including a customer portal to access existing requests and tickets, and ability to leverage AI (i.e. Chatbot or virtual agent to common inquiries and services).
•    Automated triggers for security concerns
•    Delegate functionality
•    Ability to handle freedom of information requests, securely and confidentially.
•    Multiple communication channels for customer communications (text, email, etc.)
•    Customer information collected should include at a minimum:
o    Contact information (name, address, phone number(s), email address(ES)
o    Ability to flag customers for varying scenarios (e.g., disrespectful behavior, confidentiality)
•    The ability to use built-in privacy-by-design and privacy-by-default methodologies to comply with (including but not limited to) the personal information protection and electronic documents act (PIPEDA), service organization control compliance requirements, and payment card industry (PCI) data security standard (DSS) requirements.
•    Tracking of customer demographic information
•    Ability to provide a comprehensive overview of service tasks, workloads, and employee skills to effectively assign resources and accelerate case resolution
•    Support file attachments in standard file types (e.g., DOCX, XLSX, PPT, pdf, gif, JPG, WAV, AVI, zip, .HEIC, .HEIF, .DNG, etc.) Up to 50 MB
•    The ability to create and update segmented lists, recruit subscribers, customize emails by subscription category, embed multimedia information, bulk communications to impacted customers by address or service area
•    Ability to search on all data using a variety of criteria and to extract data in the standard file formats
•    Audit logs on all data
•    Ability to flag jurisdiction ownership (region vs. local area municipality) and allow automated re‑assignment without duplicate records.
•    Ability to enable cross‑organization visibility for request status when transferred (with permissions based on role, municipality).
•    Built-in and custom dashboards, reporting, and analytics
•    Website is mobile friendly and responsive and accessible for all users.