A Practical Example of CRM–ECM Integration

Background

The City of Thionville is a town of 40,000 inhabitants, the second-largest city in the Moselle department, in the Grand Est region. It is one of Maarch Courrier’s long-standing users, in production for 12 years — first at the City, then extended to the Urban Community in 2021.

The Maarch Courrier version in use is a hosted 21.03, with the SaaS migration planned for September 2024.

In 2022, the Urban Community and the City launched a Citizen Relationship Management (GRC) project after selecting Docaposte’s GRC offering. This solution has been operational since March 2023.

Expectations and challenges

The citizen relationship management solution remains the official front office for residents in their digital contacts and interactions with the local authority.

This means that all digital requests from citizens go through the Docaposte GRC interface.

In total, since it went live, nearly 120 online services and contact forms have been developed, which have so far collected more than 5,000 requests.

Requests within the GRC’s scope are generally easy to handle, manageable independently by the departments, with no major budgetary impact, and requiring no administrative or political approval.

Otherwise, the request must be routed into a Maarch Courrier administrative workflow.

The main topics to address are:

• Contact synchronization
• How items are sent into Maarch Courrier: object types (mail, annotations, contacts, etc.), index mapping, chrono number precedence, hyperlinks, thumbnails
• The organization of information feedback between systems (statuses)
• Development of unified statistics

Within a multi-instance City/Urban Community structure, there is also the question of two-way addressing. Indeed, the Docaposte GRC is shared between the Urban Community and the City, whereas Maarch Courrier has a separate instance for each entity.

It should also be noted that Maarch Courrier is hosted on the Urban Community’s servers, while the Docaposte GRC is a SaaS-type service.

User journey

The citizen accesses the portal where the forms and online services are located  :

Some forms require creating an account, others do not.

Let’s take the example of a citizen who is about to move to Thionville and needs a reserved disabled parking space near their future home.

The citizen fills out a request accordingly:

The request arrives in the Docaposte GRC back-office. The agent in charge has filtering tools available:

As this request is not within the GRC’s scope, the agent closes it, which automatically triggers a request to send it to Maarch Courrier:

The request then lands in a Maarch Courrier queue:

The request then lands in a Maarch Courrier queue:

And in the Maarch Courrier qualification form, the user finds a main document tracing the user’s journey within the Docaposte GRC:

In conclusion

Maarch and Docaposte worked together in close collaboration to complete this essential interconnection and ensure customer satisfaction.

Together, we defined the interaction model between the two pieces of software for a “seamless” experience for both residents and staff users.

It’s worth noting that most of the work took place on the GRC side: Maarch provided assistance and expertise to help Docaposte use the Maarch Courrier Web Service APIs, as part of the support and maintenance contract.

After a full year in production, we observe that one in five requests is rerouted to Maarch Courrier.

The City and Urban Community team thus succeeded in routing and automating 4/5 of requests, through extensive work identifying and categorizing them.

Maarch Courrier nevertheless remains essential for complex and/or legally binding decision-making workflows.

A testimonial:

Committed since 2016 to improving the quality of its relationship with residents, the City of Thionville, supported by the “Portes de France – Thionville” Urban Community, wanted to develop a GRC solution allowing residents to track their request in real time.

Designed to handle simple requests, this GRC was connected to Maarch Courrier to enable municipal departments to ensure smooth processing of more complex requests — those requiring budget allocation and/or approval.

Goal achieved!

What remains now is to develop a “return” connection so that residents can track, within the GRC, the progress of their request in Maarch Courrier.

— Valérie MANGEOT

Director of Institutional Affairs and Quality Management
City of Thionville