CRM Case Study: The Institute of Incorporated Engineers

WinShark helps the IIE manage its Special Interest Groups cost-effectively Affordable CRM software solution streamlines the SIG member management system for an international professional body. Winshark Limited (www.winshark.com), a leading Customer Relationship Management software developer for small to medium enterprises (SME’s), today announces that the Institution of Incorporated Engineers (IIE), has chosen WinShark crm to manage the administration of its members’ Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The IIE was formed into a multi-disciplinary body after the merger, several years ago, of professional institutions at the Incorporated Engineer and Engineering Technician levels. Today it is one of the largest such bodies in the world, with over 40,000 members globally. The Institution is comprised of nine Special Interest Groups, formed by members with specialist interest in areas of engineering, such as IT and telecoms, manufacturing, and medical engineering. Members can select to be in more than one group, although membership is limited to a maximum of five separate groups, and this is where the IIE previously encountered problems when sending out information via email, specifically when it wanted to email the members of certain SIGs and not others.

	“The main difficulty with the management of emails going out to hundreds and even thousands of members of the SIGs at one time was further complicated by the numbers of SIGs involved,” comments Richard Armstrong, Manager Technical Affairs, IIE London. “Previously, all SIG membership details were kept in a database which had been designed using Microsoft Access. This led to a lot of frustration and time being wasted with ‘cut ‘n’ paste activities whenever we wanted to send out information to select groups within the database.”

WinShark crm has provided IIE with the ability to undertaken very fast mass emailing straight from its database so that each recipient only sees their own name and email address at the top of each communication. Additionally, WinShark's powerful database has a field for the IIE to note and store individual memberships of SIGs, meaning that no longer is time wasted ensuring that each person gets only one email from the IIE on any given subject. WinShark crm is a software solution that assists smaller businesses to greater efficiencies and profitability, and has been developed to answer the demand for a bespoke Customer Relationship Management application for the SME market. Unlike many other solutions on the market, WinShark crm is able to grow as rapidly as any business whether the user has 100 contacts on their database or 100,000. With this great drain on his time and resources now removed, Richard has been able to do more with his time and actually increase the scope of his job. One group directly benefiting within the IIE has been the Young Members Scheme (YMS), as Richard now has time to help organise events such as the recent YMS/Career Development Conference 2003, held in March at the Great Barr Hotel in Birmingham.