Orbit Group and VerseOne have completed the development of a new ‘stakeholder relationship manager’ system which, unlike typical CRM systems, treats resident and tenants as stakeholders rather than sales prospects.
Gemma Fallon, group communications manager, Orbit Group, said, “We previously had numerous databases across the business which were all managed by different teams, weren’t linked and didn’t provide up-to-date information. Contact details soon became out of date, resulting in extra work double-checking data to ensure stakeholder communications were consistent across the group.
“CRM systems are traditionally aimed at companies generating sales rather than building intelligence about stakeholders. We wanted something tailored to our requirements rather than trying to make a standard product fit our needs.”
Orbit also found that common browser-based CRM systems were cumbersome and unintuitive as their format required pages to be reloaded for every action and their navigational structure forced end-users to focus on a single task at a time.
Orbit’s CMS supplier, VerseOne, was asked to help. Chris Mounsey, product manager, VerseOne, explained, “This was an opportunity to develop a completely new way of managing contacts – by treating them as stakeholders rather than sales prospects, with an interface designed to make life better for end-users.”
After nine months’ development, VerseOne Stakeholder Relationship Manager is now complete. VerseOne SRM liberates users from restrictive workflows with a powerful search function that allows them to create custom fields and SmartGroups based on their own communications needs. The user interface is multi-layered – so-called Persistent Palettes maximise screen space and free users from unnecessary navigation and the need to reload pages.
The user interface also incorporates drag-and-drop functionality, making the application more intuitive and familiar, and is customisable to any organisation’s branding. VerseOne SRM updates and tracks changes in real time on a central server, while its Ajax DPM framework supports hundreds of users managing thousands of contacts.
Fallon said, “VerseOne SRM is easy to use. The palettes make creating and managing contact information simple and reduce the time to upload details. We can quickly log onto the system and make a note of our last activity, invite someone to an event, track their response, and even post a photo of them. VerseOne SRM is now key to our external stakeholder relations.”
