City of Westerville Ohio
City of Westerville Ohio Salesforce CRM Implementation
The city of Westerville, a thriving suburb of Columbus, Ohio, as part of its digital transformation and innovation initiative, embarked on a Services Cloud implementation for Economic Development.
About the Client
Westerville, Ohio is a community known for progressive amenities and excellent resident services. Those who already call Westerville home will tell you that this community is among the best in the nation. And Money Magazine agrees, having twice recognized Westerville as one of America's "Best Places to Live." Westerville's heritage dating back to 1809, natural beauty, and careful planning make it a special place to call home. Located in the northeast corner of Ohio's fastest growing region, Westerville is a vital city to more than 37,000 residents, a leader in job creation, and it is located just 10 miles from the airport and the state capital of Columbus. Throughout Westerville, residents enjoy more than 40 community parks and open spaces, a state-of-the-art Community Center, an award-winning school district and the old-generation Uptown District, featuring new-generation shopping, dining and entertainment. Reliable City programs and services, including municipal utilities and excellent public safety resources, keep Westerville safe and beautiful.
The Challenge
Westerville leadership needed a place to capture and share information about organizations in their region. Whether those organizations are targets or recipients of assistance, partner organizations, board members, office holders, or media, the need for shared contacts is critical to future business development efforts. This vital information needed to be shared among three main departments: Economic Development, The Community Data Center – WeConnect, and the Department of Public Utilities – BusinessWise Division.
When a qualified company seeks assistance, being able to track and share the status of each business development opportunity is key. Reporting on opportunity projects by status, region, jobs, industry, type and investment is a must.
The Solution
A CRM Solution for Economic Development was built on the Salesforce Platform and is our answer to the issues that Economic Development teams tackle every day. We built this solution to address the needs of Economic Development teams and agencies. It is easy to use, feature rich, and covers most organizations immediate needs with ample room for growth.
Here is a short list of the features of the Economic Development solution:
• Projects: Create a centralized master project record for each of your economic development initiatives.
• Programs: Search for available programs and track fund availability
• Nurture: Add Leads and Prospects to nurture lists to generate interest in your community
• Enrich: Add relevant information Prospects and Leads with a button click
• Automate: Reminders and follow-ups
• Email Templates: Send individual and bulk emails using personalized custom email templates
• Incentives: Maintain visibility of all economic incentives offered right on the master project record.
• Grants: Save all important grant information and connect to the master project record
• Offers: Easily generate offer letters with all incentives and commitments with no copy and paste
• Compliance: Easily track actual results for job creation and economic impact targets for active/won projects.
• Sites: Manage available site locations and perform site matching for Economic Development projects based on prospect needs.
• Leases: Manage leases/occupancies for business facilities such as incubators, offices, or properties.
• Investors: Track giving commitments and follow-through. Send automated notifications and reminders.
• Case & Service Management: Create business support/customer service cases, then assign and track through resolution.
• BRE Surveys: Powerful profiling and segmentation of your local business community. Complete BRE surveys and connect to actual business records – all from your mobile device!
• Dashboards: Measure the success of your department over the course of the year and year over year
Result for Our Client
The three main departments: Economic Development, The Community Data Center – WeConnect, and the Department of Public Utilities – BusinessWise Division now have a collaboration space. Westerville has the ability to track its economic development programs, their effectiveness, and hold recipients of incentives accountable to taxpayers. the city leadership has also benefited from having a visual dashboard depicting its economic development efforts.
In Our Client's Words...
"Summit has been a great partner throughout all aspects of the engagement. Westerville is unique in that we have services and associated products most City cannot provide to businesses and residents including Data Center, Broadband, and Cloud Services through WēConnect (Broadband and Data Center Public Utility); renewable energy certificates, and energy efficiency programs through Westerville Electric and the more traditional Economic Development activities. WēConnect, Westerville Electric, and Economic Develop work closely together and needed a better way to improve their processes and the customer experience. Summit's Salesforce Economic Development Accelerator provides the collaborative platform we needed to improve coordination and productivity between the teams which has effectively improved the overall customer experience. Especially the customers who benefit from services provided by all three teams. Currently, the Economic Development and WēConnect teams are using the Salesforce Economic Development Accelerator and Summit will be our partner to bring the Electric Division onboard this summer (2021). Calling this a CRM does not do it justice, we prefer to call it our Customer Engagement and Enrichment (CEE) Platform." -Todd Jackson, CIO, City of Westerville
