MPAC focuses on centralized relationship management and sees widespread benefit using Zoho CRM

The company

The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) is an independent, not-for-profit crown corporation funded by all Ontario municipalities. As a municipal body, they offer value and insight to taxpayers, businesses, municipalities, and governments. MPAC is the largest assessment jurisdiction in North America, assessing and classifying more than 5.3 million properties with an estimated total value of $2.96 trillion in 2019.

MPAC's primary function is to accurately assess and provide values for all properties in Ontario. This includes Ontario’s 444 municipalities, provincial and federal governments, as well as industry and property associations. The assessments gathered for the municipal governments are then used to apply their tax rates to their property assessments and generate income they need to deliver services to residents and businesses.

The challenge

The team at MPAC has to focus on relationship management for each municipality it serves. It is also crucial to track and manage organizational changes and priorities on the fly as they evolve. Previously, MPAC had no relationship management software and all information was maintained in spreadsheets. They also depended on the historical knowledge of individual staff members throughout the organization, but had no centralized way of tracking so many important details. This lead to many issues trying to keep up with relationship status, as well as impacting key business intelligence falling through the cracks. If a staff member left MPAC, their knowledge would be gone, as well.

The solution

Chris Rickett, Director of Municipal and Stakeholder Relations, knew that a CRM system would be crucial to help organize their information and centralize the critical knowledge their team needed. He also knew this would provide the various stakeholders with actionable insight and visibility into the key relationships in each municipality. More value could then be derived from those relationships and information would never be lost when staff left the organization.

Rickett had some experience using both Zoho CRM and Salesforce, and based on MPAC's requirements, found that Zoho CRM was the better choice. It was not only much more cost effective, but it could provide his team with easy-to-deploy customizations for their unique needs. It also has a solid feature set to manage their complex relationships and would scale as their needs changed and evolved, all while delivering value within their budget. Rickett chose the Zoho CRM Plus bundle, which has eight additional applications along with the core CRM functionality. These are all tightly integrated and provide additional value, including the ability to conduct and track surveys and email marketing, as well as business intelligence through Zoho Analytics.

MPAC was able to implement Zoho CRM in less than 45 days. While their experienced IT team found Zoho CRM intuitive and easy to use, they also leveraged Zoho's onboarding team to provide specific insight during the customization process, as well as custom training to help the MPAC team ramp up quickly.

Key functionality

Account management to organize information

MPAC needed to organize their municipalities into specific types based on size and complexity. The city of Toronto, for example, would have many more layers than smaller municipalities. With Zoho CRM, they were able to create two types of accounts: Municipal accounts with multiple contacts under each, and other accounts with data about provinces, private businesses, and trade associations. The municipal accounts captured more detail and data, allowing the team to parse and analyse information for better insight based on each account type.

Custom modules solution

MPAC uses Zoho CRM's custom modules to better segment the different account types. Their custom "Engagements" module tracks all meetings and their outcomes. It also initiates a customer follow-up with Zoho Survey to gauge and track customer satisfaction.

The "Issues Management" module helps them create an organizational view and track political issues in each municipality. This allows the MPAC team to determine whether they are widespread or confined to a single entity. Before using Zoho, these were tracked in Word documents and not everyone had access to them. With Zoho CRM, they are now able to report out on common issues in order to identify potential policy or outreach solutions they need to deploy.

They also use a "Media Tracker" module that automatically tracks historical and current media mentions of MPAC or its municipalities and records these in the CRM. This provides actionable insight to engage with a municipality and look at any past media stories about issues in the local community, allowing staff to prepare for meetings and respond to potential issues before they spread or become more serious.

Integrations for better adaptability

The team at MPAC have other technology in place and require the information from one system to be available elsewhere in the stack. They use Zoho CRM webhooks to integrate information between their in-house work management system and Zoho CRM. This gives them a single view of all organizational activities with every municipality. They also utilize the Zoho CRM and Zoho Survey integration to ensure all responses to feedback surveys are linked back to specific municipality accounts.

Benefits and ROI

The MPAC team has seen massive benefits for their outbound communication to various municipalities. When sending outbound communications previously, someone had to dig up the right contacts from a spreadsheet, find an appropriate email template, and send everything through Outlook. What previously took them two to three days to complete can now be done in minutes because all the information is available in a single place. With Zoho CRM, they simply create a group, select a pre-defined template, and send. There is now ample collaboration across the entire organization, which means their communication is more manageable and productive on all levels.

Leveraging the new CRM implementation also provides both senior management and staff access to the same information, resulting in reduced dependency on a single individual and word of mouth.

Zoho's reporting and analytics also provide deep insight into issues as they progress and make it possible for MPAC to take or avoid action before an issue becomes a bigger problem. An example of this is the "Media Tracking" module, which tracks real-time media mentions.