Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) identified an important need to increase communication with Alumni and provide further opportunities for them. The Wintec Circle was formed in order to build a community that would allow Wintec to keep track of graduates and share their successes, but also enable communication with them by sending regular updates about future courses or events. This platform was customised to allow graduates to easily reconnect to Wintec, keep in touch with fellow alumni and further develop their careers through links to Wintec and social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
‘When a client fills out a field in an online form the system send follow up tasks and emails to the appropriate people’
In order to manage the "Wintec Circle", the institution required a flexible and efficient Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The alumni group had inherited a database of historical and largely outdated student information and their system was not designed to update information or keep track of alumni. This made it very difficult to keep track of them.
‘alumni members can update their own information online saving hours every week in data entry’
The solution requested also needed to automatically update database information and had to be flexible enough to grow and change with the organisation. Lisa prepared a basic brief and worked with Business Mechanix to design the new solution. The team designed and delivered an integrated solution incorporating several technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, an online portal, Microsoft Windows Azure platform, Cloud computing and Business Mechanix’s B-Agile implementation methodology.
The final design included a multi access portal where alumni can enter and update information online and the data automatically populates the CRM system which is set up with multiple workflows and triggers the appropriate reactions when clients filled out certain fields in the online form through the portal.
"For example, if a Alumni indicates that they are willing to participate in our mentoring program in the online form, then the workflow is in place to create a series of tasks to make sure that we act on this straight away"
The project was initiated in July 2011 and went live at the end of September 2011. Lisa was stoked at the speed and efficiency of the entire process.