Hearts & minds powered CRM
Membership marketing at the heart of the Law Society
The brief
The Law Society supports, promotes and represents over 130,000 practicing solicitors. As a membership body, the Society offers a wide range of products and services funded from annual practising certificate renewals or ‘paid for’ revenue.
So a Customer Relationship Management (‘CRM’) system should give staff at the Society a single view of the member to allow them to manage, record and evaluate how members interact with them. The Society was using a CRM platform based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM which was configured and adapted for use by membership organisations. However it was in patchy use throughout different departments and teams, with a need to reaffirm it’s role, benefits of using it and to plug a variety of gaps in member data.
Strategy
Over-customisation, stop-start progress and a general need for more effective internal communication had together led to mixed impressions and inconsistent usage of the CRM system, limiting it’s success. Overall, Law Society staff had an impression of a system which had appeared to over-promise and under-deliver.
So our strategy became to start by engaging with staff throughout the Society to establish their specific needs, whilst winning over ‘hearts and minds’ in support of a vision for what CRM could deliver for the Society.
Actions
Within 60 days we’d completed more than 20 team workshops engaging directly with key staff. We acted quickly to summarise conclusions, picking out ‘quickwins’ and phasing development across seven clearly defined packages of work. With the first quickwins delivering just 30 days later, we’d started to make a difference within 90 days in total
A carefully phased delivery plan scheduled specific ‘on-boarding’ of teams across seven phases with the first five completing within 6 months of the start of the project. Phase five included connecting the CRM system to Microsoft Outlook, to become part of how every member of staff was already carrying out their work.
The big difference
We were able to engage with staff effectively within 60 days, to start delivery of benefits within 90, and to deliver a wide range of transformative benefits to the Society within six months. Real change, real benefits, but at pace.
