Mission
Active Suffolk approached us to build them a bespoke CRM system. After initial discussions, it became apparent that there was a clear disparity between their requirements and the budget their governing body had allocated for the project.
After identifying the issues they hoped to solve and learning there was a more comprehensive network of partnerships facing the same problems, we proposed investing by developing a subscription product and partnering with Active Suffolk to market the product.
The customer relationship management features were designed to make the team more effective by more readily sharing information, reducing duplicated effort, creating users to help them maintain and build relationships, and assembling processes smoothly when staff changed roles or moved on.
We travelled to meet with other partnerships to understand better the problems the alliances shared and what issues the application should be focused on solving. It was clear that one barrier to previous attempts to adopt software had failed to gain the required buy-in as time was valuable.
For this reason, we introduced several layers of automation, such as intelligently attributing their custom tags and labels by reading their recorded interactions and recognising keywords and phrases.
The feature we believe to be unique is the idea of maintaining strategic aims, sharing them between relationships and allowing the users to indicate how (or if) their interactions are progressing towards their goals.
Launch Control
The Alpha version of the application was manually tested in-house, and the QA team also produced user guide documentation alongside their test plans of application features.
We released a Beta version of the application and gathered feedback from the Suffolk partnership over six months.
Our QA team set about creating automated tests, using Selenium to allow us to efficiently undertake regression tests for the most common user flows of the application.
Success Indicators
The aim of the product was to be successfully adopted by 25% of the Active Partnerships following their trial period.
The product has been trialled by nine of the forty-three partnerships, with five converting to paid subscriptions.
