Commerce Seeks a Single System to Manage Its Citizen Services

The Commerce Department is in the market for a customer relationship management platform to use across all its divisions, similar to the products private sector companies use to manage relationships with their customers, contracting documents show.

Relationship management platforms typically allow customers to have a single profile across different divisions of a company so they can find services more easily and don’t have to enter information multiple times to purchase an item, dispute a bill or contact customer support.

Such a unified system might help a small business owner, for instance, who’s simultaneously seeking grants from the Minority Business Development Agency, a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and counseling from the International Trade Administration to boost her company’s exports.

The National Institutes for Standards and Technology, a Commerce division, posted a presolicitation document for the new cloud-based tool on Monday. A presolicitation means the department hasn’t yet committed to purchasing any new technology but is alerting vendors that it plans to do so.

Agencies have been working to use technology to improve how they interact with citizens since 2011 when President Obama issued an executive order directing agencies to adopt customer service best practices from the private sector. 

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