Weightmans, a top 45 full-service, national law firm, is deploying Lexis® InterAction®, a comprehensive CRM solution, from LexisNexis® Enterprise Solutions [1]. This investment in InterAction forms a key part of the firm’s strategy review and growth plans. Working in conjunction with the firm’s existing data warehouse, InterAction will help give the firm a unified and central database of customer and prospect data, ensuring Weightmans has a ‘single version of the truth’. Maintenance of contact information will be automated to ensure accuracy and to make the upkeep of the database in InterAction routine. These are both critical elements in driving growth and have the additional benefit of compliance with the GDPR, which comes into force in May this year.
InterAction will be available to over 1,000 people across Weightmans’ offices in Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London and Manchester.
“There are two key business drivers for our selection of InterAction,” Dan Cutts, Director of Client Relationships at Weightmans, elaborated. “Our recent strategy review focused on our growth ambitions and reorganising of our business to focus on development of client relationships in our key client segments.
“As part of that, we have reviewed our approach to business development and the analytics that InterAction provides is exceptional. The analysis and insight from the solution will enable us to embrace a much more targeted and metric-led approach to business development. Alongside that, on a tactical level, the data management tools will help us prepare for the GDPR.”
The firm has integrated InterAction’s data change management engine with the multiple external databases across the organisation. Consequently, changes to data by a marketing user updating a contact record as a result of an email bounce-back, for example, will be verified and automatically propagated across all other mailing lists, as well as in Weightmans’ practice management system, and even into partners’ Outlook Address Books – and vice-versa.
Weightmans is also deploying Lexis® InterAction® Business Edge, a specialised suite of business development tools; and Lexis® InterAction® IQ, a relationship management tool. With Business Edge, the firm will be able to bring all its client and sales opportunity data into a single location; as well as establish consistent business development processes across the organisation. Through the dashboards and reports that Business Edge provides, the BD team will have a complete picture of the firm’s opportunities and outcomes.
Simultaneously, IQ will provide insightful data, exposing the depth and breadth of relationships across the firm. This intelligence will allow all users to deliver against the individual business requirements of clients, build strong relationships and ensure client satisfaction. Crucially, the signature-scraping functionality in IQ will automatically update data in InterAction from the signature blocks of emails passing through users’ Outlook folders. With this then feeding back into the data warehouse and through to all systems, Weightmans is taking an innovative approach to keep all data in sync.
Andy Sparkes, General Manager at LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions [2], explained, “Good quality data is fundamental to the success of any business development programme. Weightmans has taken the opportunity to build on its strategy review to take a holistic look at the firm’s business development function and deployed a technology infrastructure that will help turn contacts into opportunities to fuel growth for the long term.”
The Lexis InterAction customer relationship management solution is designed for professional services organisations to help drive business relationships, accelerate firm growth and increase revenue. It is currently used by over 500 firms worldwide including nearly 150 that are headquartered in the UK and continental Europe. By providing powerful relationship intelligence that goes beyond ‘who knows whom’, the solution uncovers unanticipated risks, facilitates personalised and streamlined communications and enables execution of business development plans that can be measured by client, segment or industry – all enabling firms to deliver value and exceed client expectations. InterAction can be accessed by users from within Microsoft Outlook and ‘on the move’ from a range of mobile devices.