CRM

What is a CRM

Customer Relations Management (CRM) tools are used by business entities to track their relation with the customers, share information within the company regarding clients and to create new business opportunities. CRM tools ease the process of identifying, contacting, following-up and evaluating customer needs and satisfaction. Such tools improve communication among the different actors and increase productivity and efficiency.

The CRM processes can be broken down into the following three categories:

• Operational: Automation of certain business processes. Actions such as periodical contacts, extension of contacts to other countries, notifications, etc. can be automatised increasing efficiency and success ratio.
• Collaborative: Emphasis on client / institutes interactions.
• Analytical: Process that may lead to strategies or methods changes. Through the use of the CRM it will be possible to identify bottlenecks and new opportunities.

Need of a CRM for EGI

EGI-InSpire needs an optimised management of relationships between EGI.eu, NGIs and their potential user leads because:

• EGI partners and their “clients” are distributed
• Conversations with “clients” happen at different places, context and time, and EGI partners should be able to share that information
• EGI needs to construct a portfolio of prospective clients and explore the opportunities

Ibergrid is setting up a CRM tool based on vTiger technology to support the "Community Outreach" activity of the NGIs and EGI.eu in a number of areas:

• Recording identified contacts & leads to user communities; associate information with these leads based on interviews, discussions
• Gathering intelligence about scientific communities, institutes and projects and about topics of collaboration with them
• Monitoring activities and progress in community outreach topics
• Helping NILs and EGI.eu staff locate expertise inside NGIs

The CRM system has been deployed according to the needs identified by the "Intelligence Collection & Analysis Process" and "ESFRI Contact List" Virtual Team projects in the last two months. The features and configuration of the CRM system were presented to the NILs in a webminar celebrated in February the 13th. Based on the feedback collected at this event, and after the NIL testing phase, the CRM was fine tuned and will be opened for the NGIs and EGI.eu.

This document constitutes a short guide to use the system for different use cases.

Who is the CRM for

Who are the EGI “clients”? – All user communities that may be interested in using our infrastructure and services ● What do we want to record? – Big user communities are organized under the umbrella of projects (ESFRI, National, Others) working as frontends for the community – We want to know which projects are out there to which person to talk while approaching those projects – We want to know which research institutions are working in which project which researchers to talk ● Who will record information? – EGI.eu and NGI staff (NILs). Both will be the users of the system

Those process are exemplified in the following three main use cases:

• CRM Use Case Record ESFRI Data. ESFRI projects have an international structure that need to be considered for efficiently contacting and supporting them. The collection of the information (global objectives and contact points, national end points and associated contacts) and the tracking of the interaction of NGIs representatives and ESFRI contacts need to be managed at a global level.

• CRM Use Case NILs Interaction : NILs create entries at national level and record the contacts through the EGI-CRM. Moreover, the EGI-CRM can be used to monitor which contacts have not been contacted yet and to see the discussions between other endpoint representatives and NILs in other countries.

• CRM Use Case EGI.eu Interaction : The EGI CRM tool can help EGI.eu staff on following-up the progress of the different NILs in contacting the potential leads, as well as to identify opportunities and best practices and to widespread the information at international level among all the NILs.

How to use the CRM

The EGI CRM is based on the Open-Source tool [[ http://www.vtiger.com/crm-on-demand/help/ | VTiger ]]. It is easy to use and free, and can be customized. It provides features to 15 modules covering support, inventory, reports, security management, role provisioning, workflows...

The main concepts around CRM are:

• Account: A record for a “client” endpoint (project, institution, university, …).
• Contact: A record for a person associated under an account, used to record conversations.
• Project: Long term work (tasks, milestones) related to a Contact or to an Account.
• Activity: Short term work (calls, ToDos, events) related to a Contact or to an Account.

This section includes links to how to perform different basic actions using the EGI CRM. Descriptions on how to implement the Use Cases are described in the links in the previous Use Case section.

• Accessing the EGI CRM tool.
• Adding and browsing contacts.
• Calendar.
• Creating Reports.
• Analyzing the data.
• Activity Management.
• Support & Tools.

More information can be found in the CRM NILS How to guide and the FAQ.