The problem
The organisation has nearly 1600 members, and manages the payments via recurring invoice. The membership activation, plan change, and cancellation are handled manually. Especially when a member changes tier mid-period, the accounts department goes through a labourious process of calculating the pro-rated value of the outstanding not yet consumed month of one plan, and credit that with the next plan. The system would also not warn the members of imminent expiration of payment method, therefore per month, a significant number of payments are missed, and need to be followed up manually.
When dealing with customers, the staff rarely has a direct view on what the membership status or tier of the client is. This causes delay in service (in particular on the phone), where the staff needs to confirm the membership status prior to providing the service.
When organising menbers-only events, either online, or offline, as well as mixed events where members get discounted access, the organisation uses manually created spreadsheets to invite members, often resulting in significant error rates.
The organisation has gone through an expensive CRM project a few years back, which was considered to be a failure. This lead to a reluctance to invest large sums upfront where the perceived result is in the distant future, or never achieved.
Our solution
- A subscription system to handle subscription plans, upgrades, and invoices
- A self service portal for members to manage their own plans, and payment options
- A comprehensive view on the member card in CRM, displaying the membership, events attended, and all correspondence.
- Event management software with ticket tiers and microsite
- A webinar system that allows for invitation only as well as open webinars for members, aspiring members, etc, as well as on-demand webinars
- For increased efficiency, the accounting system is linked with the subscription system
- Moved the manual payroll to the managed payroll
- By having a monthly charge as an operational expense, there is no upfront initial capital investment required
- The program is supplemented by the digital transformation services, aligning the digital business program to the strategic goals of the organisation
Your benefits
- Automated subscription lifecycle management, saving hours of work managing anomaly invoices
- System reminder emails to members with payment cards that are about to expire, with an invitation to update the details in the portal, significantly improving the first time payment success rate
- With the full comprehensive member view, the staff reduce the time to resolve a query from 15 plus minutes to under 3 minutes on average
- Event announcements and management software look more polished, providing additional incentive for aspiring members to sign up
- The webinar software is to log into, and does not need additional software to be installed, resulting in higher participation and member satisfaction
- By moving to an integrated accounting system with payroll processing, the cost of bookkeeping has been reduced by 60%
- The strategic objectives provide a measuring stick, and the digital business provides the means to actually measure the progress. The confidence in the efficacy of the program is high across the entire team, as the results are measured monthly, and corrective steering can be applied on a month by month basis.
The verdict
The subscription management system immediately had a high impact. After the memberships were converted to this portal, in combination with the integrated accounting system, saved tons of time and labour trying to correlate the subscription invoices with the accounting system - it simply became part of the same flow. Since the previous accounting system handled payroll (crudely), it was a good opportunity to take another look at that as well. Payroll is now fully outsourced, minimizing the significantly reducing the time required to keep the books in order.
Organising events, and having a segmented approach to who we invite to these events, has not only revitalised our branding, it saves time by being able to "clone" and re-use previous events as templates.
Digital Business
The digital business foundation plan, with the following integrated applications for 14 employees:
- Subscription management
- Accounting
- CRM
- Social members portal
- Event management and ticketing
- Webinar and on-demand session application
- Email campaign marketing for event promotion
Add-on: Payroll processing (monthly pay run) and Social portal (extranet), Unlimited events, Digital transformation services
