InterSolutions, a Latin American company, provides different CRM solutions for HealthCare, Services, Government and Education. This review is on the Respond solution for Citizen Relationship Management. They are one of the few CRM Idol contestants that have a strong and well-informed public sector and political practice. The unique part of this public sector expertise is that it comes from implementations in Puerto Rico, Latin America and United States – not bad for the Americas market.

With offices in Colombia and Puerto Rico, Intersolutions has acquired a vast knowledge of CRM expertise and know-how in the government sector. This domain expertise is part of their government solution, Respond. The product is based on Microsoft CRM Dynamics; think of Microsoft CRM for Government.  With key customers in Panama, Indiana and Puerto Rico, they have been awarded two Microsoft awards:  "Service Award 2009" and “WPC 2011 Award Recognition Winner”.

The company has 15 employees in Colombia with a staff of 5 for administration and 100 employees in Puerto Rico. Based on the Respond demo it seems they have experienced Microsoft developers to go with the public sector domain knowledge. Some of their key clients are the Government of Puerto Rico and Citizen Service Center 311 in the Republic of Panama.

The solution is specifically designed for municipalities and government agencies to manage services offered to their constituency.  Citizens can use web, email, mobile and phone channels to engage the government agency and in return the agency can use a variety of CRM functionality to manage the citizen, allowing the Agency Director visibility to the staff activities and citizen requests.

While the product is built on top of Dynamics CRM, the key differentiators are the government specific features it provides:

1. Management of agencies – see figure 1
2. Workflow
3. Self-service
4. GIS integration (Bing Maps or ESRI ArcGIS) – see figure 2
5. Knowledge base
6. Service subscriptions
7. SLAs
8. Non-emergency services
9. Business intelligence – see figure 3

Figure 1: Manage Agency

Figure 2: GIS Solutions

Figure 3: Business Intelligence Reports

This is a great area for companies to be and most of them shy away from it, we applaud Intersolutions for going after this market and been successful with it. We see many opportunities for them in the public sector industry, especially as they expand into United States and other countries in Latin America.  As part of their roadmap, we would like to see social media integration and community integration to platforms like Jive, Lithium and INgage Networks. 

Reviewed by CRM Idol 2012 Primary Judges