American Campus Communities (ACC), a developer and manager of on-campus student housing, was growing quickly, creating internal communications challenges. An influx of new properties and company acquisitions meant many additional people needed access to customer and historical project data.
At the time, account information was manually entered into Excel spreadsheets, which were stored on individuals’ hard drives.This method of data collection lacked consistency and the necessary level of detail for other departments and was inaccessible when employees were traveling. The information in spreadsheets also had to be manually consolidated for senior management reports.
ACC’s business development teams, which work with universities to manage and create on-campus student housing, required a more efficient approach to manage their opportunity flow. They wanted multiple teams to have the ability to drill down into any client, prospect or project, at any time in order to improve their efficiency.
As an initial solution to centralizing sales information, ACC began using an online customer relationship management system (CRM). However, employees found it inflexible and its lack of integration with ACC’s back-end systems made reporting difficult. The company also realized that their unique business requirements necessitated a more customized solution.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM was a natural fit for their environment, as it would integrate easily with their other back-end systems. Catapult Systems had served as ACC’s long-time solutions partner, and as a Microsoft expert, they were a perfect fit to help asses and implement a new CRM solution.