Summer Cleanup: CRM

Reclaim Hosting summers have historically been our slower time of the year. This has allowed us to put some much-needed brain power towards special projects, personal growth, and organization of internal operations. While this summer has hardly felt slow, I think we’re all habitually using this time to reevaluate our responsibilities and how we communicate to make sure that Reclaim Hosting is still successfully functioning as a single unit.

Part of this process for Jim and myself has included a deep clean and organization of our client relationship manager, SuiteCRM. I have a couple of blog posts where I talk about manually installing this software, and then transitioning it and away from Asana. But I wanted to write a follow-up post today to summarize the work we’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks as we’ve had a chance to really settle into it and make it our own.

Jim and I met last week to chat about upcoming account renewals and make sure we were on the same page with regards to the status of our DoOO accounts, WPMS instances, and bulk shared hosting customers. This quickly turned into a conversation about how and, more importantly, when we’re communicating with our schools. Do schools hear from us enough? Do they feel supported? Are we in touch with all of the individual projects going on? Are we sending our renewal invoices out early enough? And what’s more, after a school gets their DoOO server, what next? I think most would say that our customer service is pretty awesome when someone submits a support ticket, but should that be the only time schools are hearing from us? When they have a question? What about the other way around? Relationships are a two-way street, no doubt, and our aim over the coming months will be to make sure we’re being intentional about meeting our end of the bargain. </tangent>

Back to CRM. So on the theme of being efficient and intentional, Jim and I have been streamlining our CRM “process”. Sounds simple enough, but with CRM’s many functions & the several steps it takes for a school to go from inquiry phase to launching phase, this really does require a little organization:

General inquiries are known as Leads. This is the Q&A phase. If a lead never amounts to anything, its active status is changed to recycled. (Note: We don’t delete anything! This is important in case the lead comes back- we have a little history to reference.) At the point that we have a signed Institutional Agreement, the school is converted to an Account in CRM. Within each Account profile, we now keep the following data:

Right at the top of the account page, we have a summary view with clickable links to various other tools, renewal date, and contact address.

Next, we have a panel that keeps track of all server history. This can be helpful for a myriad of support-related questions, but also helps us understand an account’s change & growth.

Our contacts panel is super helpful for keeping track of who handles what. A given institution could easily have a contact for the head of the project, a supervisor that oversees, along with someone in the purchasing department, and someone in the IT department. Multiply 4+ times however many accounts we have and suddenly this panel is pure gold. While I’d like to think that I have a good handle on names, this is always nice to double check before making a mistake.

Finally, the last panel that we take advantage of is for keeping a record of documents. This is pretty self-explanatory, but I love that it gives an overview of when files were added, what kind of file it is, and who put it there. That way if any questions that come up, we can always download and reference these documents.

So that’s a little peek at how we’re staying on top of things! I’m looking forward to refining this process and putting in action over the coming months. Perhaps I’ll write a post here soon detailing our renewal reminder process and how we integrate other tools like Asana and Google Calendar.