Key Operational Challenges
Membership Management
NCASS had a mixture of online and phone sign-ups with different membership tiers. They needed flexibility to accommodate changes in membership tiers with immediate access to online services. Renewal reminders often required calls due to the nature of their customer base.
Price increases caused issues as when fees changed this affected all outstanding invoices, not just the newly created invoices. This required manual work by account managers to retrospectively alter existing invoices after a price increase which was subject to human error.
Semi-Automated CPA
NCASS’s bespoke membership management system didn’t have a reporting engine. As a result, generating reports was a time-consuming manual process.
Sales Pipeline and Targets
NCASS didn’t have a system which would allow them to track sales leads and opportunities. As a result, these were managed in Spreadsheets outside of the system. Although the existing system had a Dashboard built to show counts of sales per day, week, month, and year there was a lot of manual work carried out to monitor sales goals.
Welcome Pack Processing
Creating Welcome Packs previously involved an office administrator manually copying and pasting a list of packs for dispatch. Subsequently, each certificate and members' risk assessments had to be printed individually. This procedure used to consume approximately 2 hours daily.
Lack of Marketing Integrations
The NCASS membership management system wasn’t integrated with a marketing platform and relied on the Marketing teams exporting data from the system before importing into their marketing platform. This resulted in a minimal number of regular marketing emails due to the effort required and the inability to segment on different criteria.
Manual Finance Integration
Invoices raised in the previous membership management system required manual integration to move them to QuickBooks. This took on average 2-3 hours per day.
Frequently, invoices were generated both manually in QuickBooks and automatically transmitted from the membership system, leading to the occurrence of duplicate invoices. Subsequently, manual efforts were necessary to reconcile these duplicates.
Data Migration
The way NCASS’s bespoke system had been created posed several challenges with the data migration. A particularly challenging area was the finance data where there was a mixture of invoice and quotation records which couldn’t be identified. This required a close collaboration between Cantarus and NCASS to export and translate data from the finance system to migrate to Dynamics 365 rather than the membership system which was the original plan.
