An Interview with Ben Coffelt of Society of Wine Educators

Ben Coffelt is the Membership and Outreach Manager at the Society of Wine Educators. Founded in 1974, this Washington DC-based nonprofit advances wine education through professional development and certification. We recently talked to Ben about his team's work with Aptaria.

Thanks for joining us, Ben. What challenge was your team facing that prompted you to reach out to Aptaria?

Our organization was looking for a new database/website solution that would give us more flexibility and customization. Our previous system was wildly out of date and we weren’t as able to communicate with members and candidates through our website.

What did Aptaria implement for you?

Aptaria developed and customized a solution that provides us a totally customizable website that we are able to change and update from anywhere. Our Salesforce platform solution provides a great database that provides us better tracking of all of our files, members, candidate history, and industry members.

The new website’s shopping cart system provides an ease of purchasing that we did not have previously. We’ve also automated a lot of our old practices, freeing up time and energy for us to work on new programs, events, and materials.

How has this new Salesforce system changed your business?

We are more efficient and doing better business. We have better tracking of shipments, purchases, member history, and can better coordinate and schedule our exams around the country.

How specifically has this new system changed your relationship with your customers and prospects?

Our new system provides our members and candidates more control and more access to their history with us. They have a centralized login/account where they can see what they’ve registered for, how they’ve performed in the past on our exams, what purchases they made, when they need to renew their membership, and a whole new system for Group Administration, all on the customer side.

Can you point to any quantifiable business benefits from your new system?

Time, time, time. We spend less time on the routine tasks the new salesforce system does for us automatically.

On a day-to-day basis, what do you like about working with Aptaria?

Aptaria has taken the time to understand our unique organization, our procedures, processes, and materials. Ross spent hours talking with us about what kind of solution we wanted, what that might look like, and how to deliver it to us.

He was also responsive, even when I’m badgering him with beginner questions. He always took the time to make sure I understand how best to use salesforce and our new website, or why something worked the way it does.