Inside Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber's move to ReadyMembership: AI, one CRM and a staff skills plan

Until this year, Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber Group ran on a website and CRM first put in place in 2016, with its chamber and training businesses keeping their member and customer data apart. In June 2026 the group chose ReadyMembership to replace them, as part of a wider digital transformation programme that will eventually bring every part of the group onto one platform. Four months on, the development stage is complete and the build is under way, with launch planned for early 2027. At our Future-ready chambers webinar in October, Chief Executive Corin Crane talked other chamber leaders through what the group expects the platform to change and where he sees the biggest risk, and his account is a practical guide for any chamber weighing up the same decision.

Why a chamber group needs one CRM, not several

The problem is sharper for chambers that have grown commercial arms. Coventry and Warwickshire runs a destination management company and two training companies alongside the chamber itself. Each part of the group served its own customers and, over time, built up its own tools. Corin's description will be familiar to many chamber leaders:

The cost of that fragmentation is easy to underestimate. When a local business books training through one company, attends events through the chamber and appears in a third system as a prospect, nobody in the group can see the whole relationship, and nobody can act on it. Coventry and Warwickshire's answer is a single CRM shared across the group, with each business keeping its own website for its own customers. The chamber and one training company go first, and the rest of the group will follow over the next couple of years, which keeps the first phase manageable without losing sight of the end goal.

Building a business case the board will back

With public funding falling across the network, boards are right to look hard at any large technology spend, and Coventry and Warwickshire's was no exception. "A big keen eye for us was on ROI and value for money," Corin said. "It's a big investment, and our board pushed us really hard to demonstrate where we are going to see the savings and more commercial value at the other end of it." The chamber ran a full tender, partly because of the size of the investment and partly because several of its own members supply parts of what it was buying, and the decision to choose ReadyMembership was unanimous.

The savings Corin expects come from two places. The first is the administrative work that surrounds membership, such as external funding contracts, a busy events programme, award ceremonies and HR processes, much of which currently depends on manual effort. The second is AI, which he wanted built into the platform for staff and members alike.

For staff, that means answers and reports from live data without exporting spreadsheets; for members, it means finding information on the chamber's website without having to call or email.

From broadcast to targeted marketing

The commercial return depends on marketing, and here Corin was refreshingly honest about where the chamber starts from. Without reliable data on who is interested in what, the safest option is to send everything to everyone, and many chambers do exactly that. "Probably like a lot of you, we tell everybody everything all the time at the moment," he said. "We would much rather things are going out to 10 or 15 people that are really interested in a product, rather than sending out 12,000 messages across the network."

The difference matters most for products that need a specific audience. The group's training companies support around 1,200 apprentices a year, and a recent membership review has already reshaped its commercial model. Corin sees targeted campaigns, built from the chamber's own data and using AI to identify suitable businesses beyond its current contacts, as the way to grow those products. "We've got some great products, but we're just not selling enough of them at the moment, and part of that's because we're not marketing them properly. Being able to sell our commercial products in a more focused manner could pay dividends for us."

Staff adoption is the real project

The most striking part of Corin's talk was his view of where the risk lies. New platforms rarely fail because the technology does not work. They underdeliver when staff keep the spreadsheets and workarounds they trust, and the new system ends up recording only part of what happens.

Coventry and Warwickshire has started early by involving staff from every part of the business in the development stage, so the platform reflects how they actually work. Sussex Chamber of Commerce, which went live on ReadyMembership in August 2024, offers a model for the next step: it treated testing as training, so every member of staff had worked through real tasks before launch, and two years on the whole team uses the system. The full account is in Two years on: what life after go-live actually looks like.