In March 2020, as COVID-19 emerged as a global threat, it became apparent that millions of small businesses were headed into economic peril. While White House officials and lawmakers moved with unusual speed to enact the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the task of administering financial aid to small businesses suddenly fell on the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

Legacy challenge

As an independent cabinet agency with fewer than 3,000 employees, the SBA had, until then, managed small business loan and grant applications using an email-based processing and approval system involving shared mailboxes built on Microsoft Outlook. The agency’s outdated backend infrastructure had never been designed — and was ill-equipped — to handle the overwhelming volume of relief requests flooding in from all 50 states once the CARES Act was enacted. Inboxes and storage capacities hit their daily caps almost immediately. Customers started to receive “undeliverable” messages. And SBA employees were unable to keep up with the skyrocketing workloads.

SBA’s leadership quickly recognized what many other public and private sector organizations discovered at the onset of the pandemic — to remain effective in an environment of rapidly escalating and fast-changing needs, they needed to transition quickly from their existing operating systems and adopt a more modern and scalable digital solution that could meet their rapidly-changing needs.

Transformative solution

SBA officials turned to a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365. The platform not only offered the scalability and customization the SBA needed but also allowed the SBA to implement a wide range of integrated features, including email automation, auto-routing, metrics recognition, storage optimization, spam prevention, app integration, and auditing capabilities.

More fundamentally, the shift to a modern CRM platform enabled the SBA to transition from a series of manual, labor-intensive processes to a more efficient, automated system that could quickly scale to the volume SBA needed.

Improved outcomes

Adopting a modern, cloud-based CRM platform not only helped SBA overcome a host of technology bottlenecks but also resulted in significant improvements in the SBA’s internal operations and customer service. The platform:

• Centralized all customer interactions and attached documents into a single contact record, saving a significant amount of time previously spent verifying that all required documents had been received.
• Categorized requests and automated routing, resulting in timelier responses and fewer requests left in limbo.
• Reduced much of the manual work associated with evaluating requests and eliminated common processing errors, enhancing productivity.
• Allowed SBA staff to more quickly triage cases and review work origins, notes, updates, and activities that had occurred across multiple teams for faster response.
• Provided customers with an easier way to submit a standardized inquiry using a convenient web form on my.sba.gov, built on Dynamics 365 Portal, rather than typing out an email. Customers can also schedule appointments through a Microsoft Power Pages Portal (appointment.sba.gov), assigned to SBA staff and fulfilled within the Dynamics 365 Customer Service platform.

By making it easier to integrate apps and implement a knowledge base reference library, the modernization effort also allowed the SBA to consolidate information from various sources and streamline the decision-making process. That effort was further enhanced with the creation of a Tier 1 dashboard for individual users and a Tier 2 dashboard for team leads to track overall caseloads, giving SBA staff the ability to make data-driven decisions faster and adapt to changing circumstances.

Mission modernization

Moving to a scalable, cloud-based CRM platform helped the SBA rally quickly in response to the sudden flood of aid requests. It also catapulted the SBA’s ability to meet its broader mission of serving and supporting small businesses.

In particular, the new platform made it possible for the SBA to manage activities more effectively with — and gain deeper insights about — more than 11 million individuals in its contact list.

“We can come to the campaign tabs [on the dashboard] and see a list of all of the different campaigns that the SBA has created inside of the platform,” explained SBA Program Manager Brian Quay. The software allows SBA staff to roll up all the cases associated with a contact record and even view image files to validate what information has been provided. It also allows SBA staff to see the status and performance of various marketing campaigns and activities.

“We can see…the number of members that were on [a particular] marketing list, how many messages were successfully sent to them, and failures. This is something that has been a huge productivity gain for SBA [staff], who were previously mainly sending those emails out through Outlook without an ability to track success,” the official said. Altogether, the platform helped SBA create and send more than 50 million templated outreach email from February to September 2023.

Another dimension of the SBA’s customer service modernization is the implementation of Power BI dashboards natively embedded into Dynamics 365. This allows executives who aren’t trained to use Dynamics to still access the metrics it provides by leveraging Power BI on the web or their mobile devices.  

Within two and a half years, the SBA expanded the platform from four mailboxes to over 200 individual inboxes, used by close to 80 teams with an unprecedented volume of activity. According to recent estimates, the platform now tracks over 20 million cases to date and has resulted in operational cost savings of over $25 million.

Lessons learned

The SBA’s transition from an email-based tracking system to a cloud-based CRM platform yielded several valuable lessons for federal executives considering a similar transformation:

Firstly, the importance of scalability cannot be overstated. In a crisis situation, the ability to quickly scale up operations is crucial, and a flexible digital platform can make all the difference.

Secondly, customization matters. Tailoring the system to the agency’s unique needs ensures maximum efficiency and usability.

Thirdly, integration capabilities are a game-changer. The ability to connect different tools and data sources creates a unified ecosystem, enabling faster decision-making.

Lastly, automation is a key enabler of efficiency. By automating routine tasks, agencies can focus their efforts on high-impact activities and respond swiftly to emerging challenges.

The Small Business Administration’s journey to digital modernization also demonstrates that in a rapidly evolving world, embracing innovative solutions is not just an option; it’s a necessity to empower organizations to thrive, grow, and support those they serve.

The report was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop, as part of a series on innovation in government, underwritten by Microsoft Federal.

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But when it came to online transactions with external customers, NIST officials recognized the agency needed to modernize the user experience for its customers, according to Hannah Brown, acting director of NIST’s Business Operations Office.

Like many federal agencies, NIST oversees a wide range of government services and operating divisions within the Department of Commerce. Its 3,400 scientists, engineers and technicians play a crucial role in keeping the nation’s atomic clocks, electric power grids, computer systems and manufacturing standards up to date. It also partners with more than 1,300 manufacturing industry specialists and works with another 2,700 associates from academia, industry and other government agencies.

Unlike most agencies, though, NIST generates income — from manufacturers, power grid operators, scientists and research institutions — by offering for purchase an extensive catalog of standard reference data and materials in chemistry, physics, engineering, computing and other sciences along with highly specialized calibration services.

“We’re very proud of what we do,” said Brown. “We offer world-class calibration services and standard reference materials … that are critical to commerce and make a big difference for a number of different industries. So we want the customer experience to reflect the value that we’re providing,” she said.

Rethinking the customer service equation

As far back as 2014, Del Brockett, NIST’s CIO at the time and now chief operating officer, recognized the need to modernize how NIST handled its products and services orders. Up until then, NIST’s various departments relied primarily on a paper-based system, email and faxes for taking orders.

Brockett, however, believed that NIST needed more than an e-commerce solution. NIST would also benefit from a broader, enterprise customer relationship and case management platform to improve the agency’s “insight into its customers and partner interactions,” recalled Brown.

“If you really want to have a sense for the work that you’re doing, and the customer you’re providing services to — and if you want metrics around that to understand what you’re doing to make real improvements — then you’re going to need a platform that gives you that overall view. That’s really the point of a good CRM,” said Brown. “The nice thing too, is that it offers a higher level of accountability into the work we do, and transparency into how we’re providing those services.”

That belief was fueled in part by a series of successful deployments of a cloud-based, enterprise workflow management platform at that time.

The deployments gave NIST employees real-time insights into the progress of internal projects and resulted in a wave of improvements in customer service internally. That sparked a search for something similar to support NIST’s external customers and ultimately, a modern enterprise CRM and case management platform, according to Brown. NIST decided in late 2015 to begin work with Salesforce’s Service Cloud platform.

One factor that contributed to that decision, beyond the continuous updating software-as-a-service can offer, was its availability within the government’s FedRAMP-approved cloud environment, meaning it has to keep meeting the government’s detailed security requirements.

“Security and privacy are a big deal for us. We have an extensive process that we take to make sure we are guarding the data in our systems as well as we possibly can,” Brown noted.

Once the CRM system was deployed and ready for testing, the operations and IT team chose a low-pressure rollout, letting NIST’s products and service team leaders experiment with it.

“That was an important decision,” said Brown. “We knew the system itself was a great tool to use. But it was something we wanted people to use NIST-wide, so it was important to give people an opportunity to try it out. Like every new tool, it’s not about the technology, but the people and the approaches they use that really make the difference.”

Having a robust case management component also provides an important dimension of accountability, Brown said.

“It’s not just a way to gather data. You have a way to follow through on promises made,” she said. “And that’s a big deal. When you’re a private company, that’s really critical because you have a bottom line to meet. When you’re in federal government, that’s really critical because that’s your constituency — that has everything to do with our mission.”

Expanding e-commerce front-end

After getting the CRM system in place on the backend, NIST then began to tackle the work of improving the e-commerce interface experience for customers on the front end.

“There were early versions of e-commerce spread all over the place on our internal legacy systems, but there wasn’t a way for customers to go online and request quotes and purchase products directly and in a unified way,” Brown explained.

NIST’s development team opted to build on Salesforce’s B2B Commerce platform, deploying a foundational e-commerce platform in the spring of 2019 that supports NIST’s calibration services. The platform captures online orders for calibrations and funnels them into an order management process. If customers have questions, they’re able to initiate a request via email that becomes a trackable case and can be associated with every potential order, according to Brown.

Within a matter of months since then, NIST had digitally processed about $5 million in orders from about 900 different customer accounts, giving NIST officials confidence they were headed in the right direction.

“One of the factors that has everything to do with our success and, or, failure — and I mean both of those words intentionally— is having the right team, selecting the right tool, and the vendor you choose to work with who will do your development and manage the project,” Brown said.

Based on the initial positive reviews from customers, NIST is currently seeking information on a new round of development projects to expand on the capabilities offered through the e-commerce platform.

Next up on NIST’s development list are plans to make the agency’s standard reference materials and data references also available online, as well as training resources, according to Brown.

Longer-term, NIST has set its priorities on expanding e-commerce functionality for all of its products and services across the agency and creating a simpler, more unified experience for its constituents, said Brown.

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