London Chamber of Commerce & Industry

Background.

London Chamber of Commerce (LCCI) is the capital's largest independent networking and business support organisation, connecting London businesses and representing their interests. They offer members practical and professional services including hosted B2B events, member-to-member marketing opportunities, legal and HR advice, access to their exclusive central London meeting space, and the opportunity to be part of an international trade mission programme.

Goals.

The LCCI required a new website to showcase their comprehensive offering to potential new members and provide a portal for existing members to access the Chamber’s services. Objectives of high priority included: 

• Provide superior customer service, reducing costs and increasing resource efficiencies 
• Meet user communication expectations with 24/7 access 
• Member acquisition 
• Prospect intelligence & sales pipeline functionality 
• Improve member retention through personalization 
• Digital connectivity between national and international Chambers 

Challenges.

Showcasing LCCI’s offering to prospects yet providing members with portal access to services added complexity to streamlining user experience.

Tiered membership levels meant each member level received access to different services and the portal needed to be able to cope with this. This posed a challenge to build the website in a way that enabled content to be displayed based upon an organisation’s membership status. LCCI rolled out a highly customised Microsoft Dynamics CRM in parallel to the build. A custom third-party web service, built to sync data points, was not complete for the project start, resulting in concurrent development. Balancing the priorities of each third party inevitably brought challenges.

Solution.

Kentico EMS was selected as the appropriate product for the LCCI build as it enables the client to leverage personalisation features, ideal for managing a complex membership programme effectively. 

Features were used as follows:

Registration / Membership 

• Multi-tiered membership signup capability 
• Create and edit member details 
• Enable ‘Organisations’ to be created rather than only contacts 
• Initial Free user registration with upgrade option 
• LCCI approved Kentico workflow, developed to add organisations into the Members’ Directory before displaying on the site, ensuring accuracy, appropriateness, and consistency of fields 
• Sophisticated payment and transaction capabilities to support LCCI’s membership tiers with different associated costs 

Members Profile 

• Ability to edit organisation and associated contact details 
• CRM contact record integration for portal login 
• User Admin privileges option 
• Contact preference management integrated and stored within the CRM 
• Implementation of a Kentico custom workflow process using complex management of document versions to publish data fields on the members’ directory in line with LCCI approval process 
• Manage event bookings including adding and editing attendees for LCCI’s 200+ annual events

EMS 

• Adoption of core Kentico EMS Personalisation features to deliver content based on membership status of logged-in users—enabling each user experience to be tailored to their needs and membership type.

Content Personalisation 

• Members’ status drawn directly from CRM for granular content management 
• Level of personalisation implemented down to widget level, meaning a banner widget could be configured to display a different banner for each member type 
• Nearly all content components built within the site can be configured this way

Integration Failover 

• Whilst a third-party web service was required due to the high levels of customisation made to LCCI’s new Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Kentico features were also implemented to support the integration 
• Outgoing CRM updates are processed through the Kentico Integration Bus – the advantage being if the endpoint is down, the update is stored in a queue to resend when the endpoint is back up 
• A Kentico Task was set up to regularly poll the web services, checking that they are active—an email notification will be sent if the endpoint goes down, allowing LCCI to respond to and resolve issues quickly