Lauri Travis, Community Manager, Tyler Technologies, Inc.

SuperNova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Company

Tyler Technologies serves the public sector with an expansive software portfolio designed for cities, counties, agencies and schools to manage complex day-to-day business functions related to appraisal & tax, courts & justice, ERP, financial, CIS/CRM, public safety, and school  software applications. Tyler is the largest public sector software provider in the United States with over 11,000 clients. Tyler has 26 offices in 11 states and 22 active product lines. Some of Tyler’s clients include large cities and schools in Dallas, Texas, Riverside, California, Belton, Mississippi, Clark County, Nevada, and British Columbia, Canada.

The Problem

Tyler clients had an option to call into support, start an online chat, create a support ticket, or to get information from the support portal for each product line during regular work hours. Public sector policies at the time made governmental agencies reluctant to get involved in any online or social activities and traditional web technology was preventing us from providing clients and employees with easily accessible, current information. Our users are often the people you see working at a court or city office, who do not have time to wait in a chat or in a phone queue for solutions to everyday work issues.

The Solution

We saw emerging technologies that could improve search capabilities and offer file sharing, also how forums and wikis could help quickly provide clients with up-to-date information without having to call support. We obtained the tools we knew would solve our problems, championed high-level managers within the company to support this new way of thinking, and used the momentum from Open Government and Gov 2.0 initiatives to design a new social experience, entirely for business needs, that supports real-time collaboration, allows robust searching and builds trust between Tyler and our clients.
Video from Tyler marketing used at our conference in Boston, Mass. to introduce Community:   http://www.tylertech.com/videos/tyler-community

The Results

Tyler changed the face of support in the local government and school software industries by offering the first ever 24/7/365 social support platform where users can access an effective search, easily download and upload files, ask questions, offer solutions and best practices to others, as well as propose new ideas for Tyler products.

The Technology

Tyler purchased Telligent Community to provide a social platform for online support and product innovation. 

Metrics 

Traditional support in this industry consists of an 800 number, online support tickets or chat and a support portal, operating more or less “normal business hours, five days a week.” Tyler changed all that.
• Before this project, no government or school agencies used a social platform to access software support.
• Since the launch of Tyler Community, membership went from 200 to 15,000 registered users in 17 months. We have about 4000 active users, in 116 groups and 142 active forums.
• Tyler Community has been the differentiator in several sales for Tyler over the past year. The sales team proclaims Tyler Community as the “nationwide community” that acts as a user group for our smaller clients like the State of Wyoming; this is monumental since these states tend not to have enough users to form a group for discussion of software products. This allows the smallest of clients to join the ranks of larger clients in what information they can receive and share.

Disruptive Factor

When we started our community, the status quo for municipal governments was to block most social networks and ban surfing the web at work. No other government or school software provider offered social tools and they were unable to offer 24/7/365 online support with all the features of our Community. We have heard that our competitors have started Facebook pages and Word Press forums in a vain attempt to keep up with us, but we had captured the competitive advantage because we introducing the perfect technology at the perfect time, as Open Government and Government 2.0 were emerging and the relationship between government and technology was on the verge of changing to a more transparent environment.

Shining Moment

A surprising factor of our Community has been the opportunity to create forums for product innovation where we have been able to dramatically enhance conversations with our clients.

  • Clients can now view, rate and comment on their ideas moving the most popular suggestions up for consideration by development. We currently have 16 product suggestion groups running on our platform with 183 (6%) of all the ideas submitted over the last 6 months approved for development. In some cases the suggestion groups have enticed otherwise skeptical clients to start using Tyler Community and these simple groups have been extremely well received.
  • Before our suggestion forums, like with most other providers, ideas from clients went into a queue which was more like a black hole and were not managed properly. Our developers can now filter the ideas on the fly and respond to each individual one as needed. This keeps a zero backlog (down from 1,500) on unattended suggestions since a feasibility decision is made when a request is posted.
  • We have had ideas we could add quickly and make customers extremely happy by just changing an interface or adding a field, but more importantly, simple ideas that make a big impact. One example is in our Texas Highway Patrol software, a feature was added to display cross streets at all times to officers in the field. This feature also keeps them from clicking an additional button to view the cross streets and actually makes an officer safer by allowing him or her to see the full view around the area.

About Tyler Technologies

Tyler Technologies (NYSE: TYL) is a leading provider of end-to-end information management solutions and services for local governments. Tyler partners with clients to empower the public sector — cities, counties, schools and other government entities — to become more efficient, more accessible and more responsive to the needs of residents. Tyler’s client base includes more than 11,000 local government offices in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and other international locations. Forbes has named Tyler one of “America’s Best Small Companies” five times in the last six years.