B!CRM

B!CRM stands for Building and Client Relationship Management. This is a new strategic tool that we are developing at Space Database to give Arcade a competitive advantage in business development and customer service. This software will give us a clear understanding of our dealings with our clients. It will give us new insights by helping us map and understand the relationships between people and buildings. With our new 'B'CRM system we will be able to associate our clients with the physical assets that they manage.

 Contact Management

We all have contact lists of people we deal with frequently. Whether they be in Outlook, Act or in a paper address book. One of our goals is to consolidate these lists so that we have a single source of accurate and up to date data that we can all share. This will save time in that only one list has to be maintained. As a shared list, we can put more energy into keeping it complete and up to date.

 Relationship Management

Once we have more than one person dealing with the same list of contacts, managing the relationship between our clients and prospects and our organization becomes more difficult. How do we know we are communicating information to clients that is relevant to their roles? How do we ensure that three people are not trying to sell them the same thing? How do we make sure we don't forget about some people all together? The situation starts to become more complex now that we are providing many different products and solutions.

As we try to coordinate our services and sales efforts across disciplines we need a system to track all of the communications we have had with a client. We need to be able to see and share all the points of contact that our clients have with us. This is the role of the client relationship management part of the system. An online CRM system will let us see all of the significant contact we have had on every level whether it is by phone, a mail out, a meeting or even a complaint. When we are speaking with anyone of our clients we will know what their history and experience has been with us and our colleagues.

 Building Relationships

What is unique about our business - what sets it apart from other sectors is that we have ongoing relationships with physical assets as well as with people. We need to track what we do with buildings in addition to what we do with people. When we looked at commercial contact management and CRM products, it was the inability to track relationships to buildings that was the biggest impediment. Using off-the-shelf software would in all cases require quite expensive customization or work-arounds. The cost of this combined with the licensing fees drove the pricing up for commercial software to be greater than the cost of developing our own solution.

In our 'Building' & Client Relationship Management system, we can track the relationship between our clients and the roles that they play for the buildings they are involved with. For each building we can track the people that are related to it. We can see what projects different people in Arcade have participated in for each building. We can also see what information exists in Space Database that we can leverage for our projects.

 Integration

A system like this will be useless unless it is used by everyone and maintained over time. Ease of use is not just a convenience but a critical success factor. If people do not use this system on a routine daily basis, it will not provide any benefits. It is essential that we make the system very accessible and easy to use. Our strategy will be to put the information in front of people in more than one place. We will integrate the front end of the application into our company portals, offer it as a stand alone web site and display information from within Outlook. In the next version we will also provide a mobile interface for use on Blackberrys and cell phones.

 Here are some examples of how the data will be displayed:

In the Space Database portal

In the Frankland & Associates Portal

In Outlook as a tab under each contact

 Goals

The development and use of this system will allow us to achieve three things. First it will help us communicate better with our clients. Having up to date contact information that is easily accessible and that includes histories of our interactions will make it easier to stay in touch with our clients. Second, more effective communication and better intelligence about people and buildings will support our sales efforts and help generate more growth. Finally a deeper understanding of our clients and a holistic view of our communication with them will allow us understand our clients better and enable us to deliver superior service.