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.

Why EGI needs a CRM

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

The CRM system is for EGI.eu and NGI members. All research communities should be considered as potencial users of EGI infrastrucuture, but since their activities are normally organized under the umbrella of big projects, both EGI.eu and NGI members should capture and gather information about those initiatives, their associated research institutes and contacts. The CRM system allows EGI.eu and NILs to record and correlate information in an organized and hierarchical form, so that it can be shared by all partners. EGI.eu and NGI staff (NILs) will be the main users of the system.

What should be recorded in the CRM

Big user communities are organized under the umbrella of high level initiatives (ESFRI projects, National projects, Other international projects) working as frontends for the community. EGI.eu and NGI members should:

• Capture and record information about which projects are active in the region
• Capture and record information about which persons should be contacted while approaching those projects
• Capture and record information about which research institutions that are working in those projects
• Capture and record information about which persons should be contacted while approaching those research institutes

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

1. 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.
2. 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.

How to use the CRM

The EGI CRM is based on the Open-Source tool VTiger . The main concepts around EGI 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.