Selection of Systems to Support a CRM Approach – Professional Institute

Our Client

A professional institute that is both concerned with the development of standards and education in its sector, as well as promoting the rights of its members. Because of the wide variety of individuals and organisations it deals with, it wished to established a more coherent way of communicating with its ‘stakeholders’, both internal and external.

Our Brief

BlueSpark Consulting was appointed to help the institute:

• Put in place processes to assist it in its objective of adopting a more ‘customer-facing’ stance
• Help identify requirements for IT systems to support this objective
• Help select appropriate systems.

Our Approach

The project first involved an exercise to determine what members expect of the association, plus an investigation of the experience of members and stakeholders when they communicate with the organisation (e.g. answering queries, enquiring on and booking places on events, etc.). Using a mix of workshops and project teams, we assisted the institute in the process of realigning its organisation to better serve its members and improve internal processes and communications across departmental boundaries.

The next phase was to identify requirements for IT systems that would not only support the CRM project, but also improve the administrative and communications processes within the organisation. By running and facilitating a series of workshops, during which we introduced different options for supporting key requirements, supplemented by a questionnaire and meetings with different units to further refine their requirements, we identified the institute’s key requirements. We then worked closely with a team from the institute during a tender and selection exercise for a new integrated membership/contact administration system. We assisted our client in identifying the most appropriate system and supplier and helped negotiate contracts with the supplier.

We were then involved in the implementation up to and including agreeing a specification of the changes needed to be made to the standard package software to meet specific requirements (these mainly concentrated on improving the process of entering an searching for information by minimising the number of screens that had to be used and in providing certain key information effectively). We then assisted them to recruit a project manager to support them during the different implementation phases.

Our Achievements

The institute has now successfully implemented the first phase of the new system; this has enabled them to stop using their old system and has had the benefit of making more effective the processes involved with processing members subscriptions, handling member queries and administering its range of education courses and publications; delivering real benefits. It is now in the process of linking its membership system with its website, which will bring further benefits.

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