England Golf Case Study
“We are delighted with the outcome of this project which was delivered on time and within budget. We have already started to see how the use of the system is helping us achieve our strategic objectives.”
The Client
The client England Golf is the governing body for all amateur golf in England.
Their main activities focus on the following objectives:
Participation – maximise the number of people playing golf.
Player development – coach and manage promising amateur players
Championships – organise prestigious amateur golfing championships throughout the year.
Governance and compliance – maintain the integrity and reputation of amateur golf in England.
Their Challenge
Given their broad range of responsibilities the organisation tended to operate in silos rather than a single business and over the years systems had developed independently to serve each team.
This situation impacted the performance of the organisation in the following ways:
- Data was held in multiple systems and spreadsheets leading to multiple versions of information and data inaccuracy.
- It was very time consuming to maintain the many sets of data.
- No team had clear sight of how other teams were interacting with any organisation or individual.
The challenge to rectify the above was made more complex by running in parallel two projects to redesign the website and to implement a new e-marketing system.
The Solution
England Golf initially engaged Arriga CRM to help define the requirements of a CRM system.
Each of their 38 significant business processes was analysed, documented and used to detail the functional requirements needed to support them.
As a result of the tendering process to implement the specified CRM system, the contract was awarded to Arriga CRM and the project started in November 2017.
The system consists of a large amount of custom entities (over 20), centred around a single contact and a single account record being used to represent each organisation and/or individual that England Golf interacted with.
Standard activity and note functionality were customised to allow users to record all interactions in the system. This was enhanced through the deployment of the standard Microsoft Dynamics 365 Outlook App which allowed emails and appointments to be recorded easily in the system via Outlook.
Complex integrations were written using Scribe to integrate the data between the CRM system and the new website as well as the existing handicap management system (Central Database of Handicaps). Key aspects of the business processes were automated using the workflow functionality of Dynamics 365.
Further integration was implemented to England Golf’s chosen event management system (Eventbrite) and to their new e-marketing platform (Dotmailer). The latter uses custom workflow elements to facilitate the real-time sending of confirmation emails based on events recorded in the CRM system.
Early in the development process, England Golf relaunched one of their major initiatives, ‘Get into Golf’, which is designed to attract more ‘non-traditional’ golfers to the sport.
This introduced some new requirements and also required that a skeleton system was live and integrated with a new dedicated micro-site by January 2018. Arriga CRM were able to accommodate these new requirements.
Following the development of the system and a period of system testing, Arriga CRM guided England Golf staff through a detailed user acceptance testing phase. Every staff member received training on the system (over 100 users) and Arriga CRM advised on ways to maximise the system adoption through various initiatives including the introduction of a shared set of ‘principles of use’.
The system went live in June 2018. Following go-live, Arriga CRM remains involved to monitor usage, continue upskilling the client’s technical staff so that they become more self-sufficient and assist with the production of maintenance releases.
The Results
The implementation of the new CRM system at England Golf has been transformative. England Golf’s six key principles identify the significance of the system to their business and their attitude towards it. They are:
- Total transparency for everyone, everywhere – no silos, no secrecy. Just complete clarity.
- ‘One team’ mindset. No more personal lists! One single source of accurate data, created by us, for us.
- One-stop-shop for dependable data. Accurate data will drive our business success and the CRM is where you will find it.
- Quality data. Make accuracy a habit Our data must be 100% accurate. That’s down to all of us. We’ve got to get it right, all of the time.
- Data responsibility. Handle it lawfully and respectfully. We’re all responsible for the integrity of our data, legally and morally.
- Use it or lose out. Our data is only as good as we make it. We all lose if just one person stops creating it.
“Without this fully integrated system, it would have been almost impossible to deliver on our strategic commitments.”
The system has already shown its benefit in dealing with the new GDPR requirements and usage is such that it will continue to support England Golf key objectives of:
- Increasing participation by using the integrated system to target communications accurately
- Improving operational efficiency and increased levels of customer
- Promoting the benefits of the sport and raising the profile of the England Golf brand.
