Carey Olsen ‘on the Peppermint journey’ after successful CRM rollout

Carey Olsen says that it is ‘on the start of the Peppermint journey’ including looking at Peppermint’s practice management system and other offerings after a successful business development CRM solution implementation across its nine offices.
The leading offshore firm went live on the CRM solution in June 2018 and in the first four months, 6,000 new contacts were added; open rates were up by 55%; click rates up by 26%; while undeliverables went down by 14% and unsubscribes by 70%.
James Prouten, group head of technology at Carey Olsen, said: “We are on the start of the Peppermint journey and are actively looking at Peppermint’s online portal, practice management system and other offerings.”
While Peppermint’s core CX solution comprises a full suite of legal applications, the UK-based legal technology provider as of August 2017 has offered clients the opportunity to adopt applications on a modular basis. In 2018 it launched Dynamics 365 public cloud customer relationship management system, which continues to gain the interest of Microsoft’s larger enterprise clients.
The firm’s feedback on the CRM system is extremely positive. Anna Coombs, brand & marketing communications manager at Carey Olsen, said: “Our last system was little more than an address book, not a CRM and people did not use or trust the data.  It is now seen as a business-critical system – a central hub, which allows us to be joined up and share intelligent and rich data.”
Carey Olsen particularly likes Peppermint’s dashboard functionality, which provides a centralised view of CRM activity across the whole business.
“We are using the dashboard functionality to create ‘live’ CRM business plans. It allows us to track CRM activity against performance targets,” said Prouten.
The CRM roll out took 12 months, including end user training from iTrain.
As we all know, CRM success is only partly about technology, and Coombs said: “Managing the change and cultural shift internally was critical. Ensuring that we issued regular firm-wide communications to keep employees up-to-date on the project helped.”
She adds: “Just four months in, we really started to see the benefits. Internally people could see the change happening – we worked hard to bring people along on the journey and engagement increased considerably in months three and four post-implementation.”
The results come as CRM rises further to the top of law firms’ to-do list, as the acquisition and retention of clients is increasingly determined by the quality of digital engagement.