According to software company Transversal, £1.5bn of public money is being wasted on complex and expensive CRM systems that are not making life easier for people who want to access government services.

In recent remarks to the IT press, company spokespeople cited research by Accenture and Gartner, which suggests that the majority of visitors to government websites are not able to resolve their queries.

Transversal is using the research to help promote its own product as a much more intuitive model of how government CRM systems can be designed and delivered to the end user. Amongst the product's touted abilities is the capacity to respond to customer queries more efficiently than the bulk of solutions that the public sector is currently investing in.

Gerard Buckley, the CEO of Transversal, comments that failings in public sector websites do not make good reading considering the Government's 2005 deadline, and he complains that money is being irresponsibly invested in highly expensive and complex systems that are not delivering greater accessibility.

To support its assertions further, Transversal quotes Douglas Alexander, Minister for the Cabinet Office, who is on record as saying that online government services should be intuitive, reliable, trustworthy and accessible.

'If the public sector really wants to provide effective e-service it should be looking at the private sector's CRM mistakes and learn from them: bearing in mind that 7 out of 10 private sector implementations failed to deliver the benefits promised. Simple web self-service systems are a much more cost-effective solution and actually directly meet customer needs,' he told IT reporters.