Customer Relationship Management

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Prior to canceling the official cancellation of 2020's D term IQP global project centers, one of the major areas the team had intended on helping AmCham Romania was with their Customer Relationship Management system. AmCham Romania had challenges with ensuring the data from their members were up-to-date and had trouble with keeping track of changes made.

Not being able to travel to AmCham Romania's Bucharest office required adjustments to the project as with accordance to EU Data Sharing laws, we would not be able to access AmCham's database and CRM. Thus, below are the materials we had previously prepared including CRM background research and interview questions. We hope that our research and resources will be helpful to IQP teams that will be collaborating with AmCham Romania in future Bucharest IQPs.

Customer Relationship Management Practices

What is CRM?

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a strategy of using data analytics and other marketing, sales, and service techniques to help companies retain and gain customers. Anything from customer service to data management to social media can have CRM methods that keep customer relationships as the utmost priority. These methods typically include using a CRM system and established best practices in order to improve current business relationships, identify potential new clients/customers, and prevent loss of customers

Centralized CRM systems

CRM systems are typically centralized platforms through which data and media are linked. They generate specified statistics based on stored data both for displaying to customers and for information about the status of customers and customer relations. The data can be gathered through media sources by user entry or by cookies which create usage data. The data can then be fed directly through the CRM system into a database which can be stored locally or on the cloud. Then the statistics produced by the CRM system can be displayed directly to media such as websites or social media pages to provide information to current customers and attract potential customers.

Third-Party Vendors (SaaS)

There are many third-party vendors who sell CRM system products as SaaS (Software as a Service). All of the vendors offer their own unique collection of features which complement the purpose of a CRM, enhance its applicability, or increase ease of operation by the client business. For Example, Salesforce includes software for email integration, workflows, marketing automation, dashboards, reports, and sales forecasting along with many other features.

Customer Relationship Management Implementation

Analysis of CRM

While working with AmCham Romania, we aim to use the feedback from the conducted interviews to help us focus and tailor our efforts and recommendations to the most prevalent issues that employees notice when working with the CRM system. Being able to handle and view the CRM system ourselves would be helpful in analysis of flaws and make it easier to view the problems mentioned by staff in interviews. This analysis will be compared to best practices to better identify precisely which areas could see minor and major improvements.

Best Practices for AmCham

By comparing case studies of other American Chambers of Commerce to conventional CRM system uses and practices (by businesses), we hope to establish best practices and implementation for a Chamber of Commerce's CRM system. These will be fitted more in favor of communication rather than sales as Chambers of Commerce gear themselves toward membership instead of selling a product. By determining a set of best practices for member based businesses like Chambers of Commerce, we set ourselves up to draw conclusions on the implementation of AmCham Romania's CRM system.

Improvements vs SaaS

After drawing conclusions from the comparison of our set of best practices and the analysis of the current CRM system, identifying issues will be simple. The next step is to make recommendations based on the problems found. If the shortcomings of the current system are minor or easily fixed, we plan to look into and suggest solutions that will avoid needing any revamping of the system. However, if the problems seem to be major or extensively common, we plan to also consider third-party SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors as a viable option. To determine which vendor has the best features to fit AmCham Romania's needs, we would use SelectHub to easily and thoroughly compare potential choices. Either way, we hope to be able to both make our recommendations and help set them in motion while we work with AmCham Romania.

Website and CRM Interview Questions

One of the methods we planned on pursuing was interviewing the AmCham staff on their experiences with the organizations CRM and website. The interview would've been voluntary 15-30 minute face-to-face interviews with as many staff members as possible.

Opening Questions

What is your current position at AmCham?
How long have you been with AmCham Romania?
Have you ever worked with or currently work with the CRM?
- Worked with:
  - Go into CRM Questions
- Have not worked with:
  - Go into Website Questions

CRM Questions

How often do you use the CRM?
What are your daily practices with the CRM?
What works best about the CRM?
What is the ideal outcome of the CRM?
What doesn’t work about the CRM?
What could be done differently with the CRM?
What do you use the data for? (statistics, communication, etc.)
Do you use the database for communication with your members?

Website Questions

On a scale of 1 - 10 (1 being not useful and 10 being very useful), how useful do you find the website?
Please explain why you gave this score (from previous question) to the website?
What do you use the website for?
Do you know if members actively use the website?
What information would be beneficial to the website