The Sandy Springs City Council approved a five-year contract with Salesforce totaling $1.93 million to support the city’s resident services platforms at its Nov. 3 meeting, a cost increase of more than 800% from its current system.
Sandy Springs council members called the nearly $1 million annual expenditure “expensive,” but agreed that the top-rated, AI-integrated replacement system was worth it. According to staff, work on the phased nine-month project will begin after New Year’s.
The council later approved a $711,750 contract with StackNexus, the company tasked with setting up the new system. With Salesforce’s first-year license fee of $220,833, the total cost falls within the $1 million budgeted for the project, or Digital Innovation initiative, this fiscal year.
What is the new software?
Local governments have been using customer relationship management (CRM) software to keep track of public property like pipes, streetlights, and signs, schedule repair jobs, and record maintenance history and costs.
The Salesforce platform is designed to integrate the city’s resident- and staff-facing portals while replacing the city’s existing back-end system of more than 20 years, Lucity. Salesforce is widely considered a market leader and best-in-class CRM in the public and private sectors.
The city’s cloud-based platform, Sandy Springs Works, which allows residents to report non-emergency issues and requests, is powered by SeeClickFix from CivicPlus. The Sandy Springs online permitting platform uses another major government technology company, OpenGov.
Keith McMellen, the city’s director of data strategy, analytics, and AI integration, said the city’s existing system is cheap but has a service delivery gap because of its manual, email-based structure.
“While all of that operational data exists, it’s really hard to get access to; reporting is very challenging, or connecting systems,” McMellen said. “For residents, they have very limited visibility into status, updates, any closure … they have to call back in, remember their ticket number.”
Council Member Andrew Chinsky said he thinks the contract approvals will go under the radar, but “is sneaky super important.”
“You’ve got to get the blocking and tackling right, and best-in-class customer service,” Chinsky said. “I’m in favor of this; I know it’s the most expensive option. The delta is really the first year and the implementation cost, so this is not going to be an ongoing cost to taxpayers.”
