Brenda Villalobos
Account Manager - CRM
Martin V. Smith School of Business & Economics
Alumni CRM
Project Info
Year
Winter 2022
Work
CRM
Research
Data Cleaning
Project Managing
Client Communication
About MVS Alumni CRM
Martin V. Smith School of Business & Economics (MVS) at Cal State Channel Islands wanted a CRM system for an Alumni database. At the start of this project, I became the Account Manager, leading four team members, and I was the point of contact for my client, the MVS's Dean.
The Challenge
I had never done a CRM project, so there was much to learn. In addition, there was no existing CRM to reference, so my team and I had to build one from scratch.
The Outcome
As the account manager, I had a role in setting up a Microsoft Teams page for my project to organize files, information, and meeting notes for my team members to use.
I created a timeline for my team members to prepare ahead of time for each meeting and know when deliverables are due to complete the project in time.
My team and I had to meet with the MVS Dean to give us an idea of what we will be expecting, and it gave me an idea of how to start the project to determine our steps.
With the information the MVS Dean gave us, I started the team with CRM platform research to give a list of CRM platforms that fit the MVS Dean's needs. The list included functionality, user friendly, price, and other needs the business school wanted to provide for the best of their use.
Putting the information onto a slide deck presentation for the Dean, my team and I added information on what they would like to present based on their findings. I organized the information to appear that one person created the presentation for consistency. With our research of CRM platforms, the Dean decided to go along with our suggested CRM platform.
The CRM platform that my team and I suggested would leave us to create a CRM platform from scratch. Along with that in mind, we were given the Alumni data to conduct data cleaning and remove unwanted observations. I continued to communicate with my client on the team's progress and give her an overview of our following action items for the data cleaning phase.
This project gave me a choice to be present as an Account Manager for two project phases until I transitioned out of the project to make time to graduate in my desired semester.