At Venture Solutions, we work with our clients to help identify opportunities to improve processes and workflows, so it was exciting to learn that the E-Solutions product team did just that for our own business.
Last year, the team learned that our former provider for the Direct Messaging functions within Venture Access would be changing their business model and would not be able to support the services that we needed. They realized this was an opportunity to leave behind manual, inefficient processes and find a better solution that fit within the greater drive for automation and transformation of processes.
The old process had Direct Messaging spread between multiple email providers, preventing Venture Solutions from taking advantage of volume discounts and the efficiency of automation. Director of E-Solutions, Jill Krueger, said of the complicated nature of manually sending out the communications, “We knew it was an area to grow. Consolidation was necessary.”
Over the course of six months, the team conducted R&D on different providers to determine what options were available and suited our needs. Part of this process involved interviewing other Taylor business units to learn about their experiences with different email providers, what they liked about them, and what they did not. They also conducted interviews with the list of candidates to hear directly from each provider about their ability to meet our needs.
All of the data and information collected from these interviews was placed into a matrix that calculated all the different categories to evaluate the candidates by—pricing, SMS support, etc.—which allowed them to narrow their search down to the provider with the best fit.
Within nine months of beginning this project, the team had successfully migrated 56 Venture Solutions clients, each of whom used multiple templates within Direct Messaging.
Director of Software Engineering, Ryan Spitler, credited the leaders of his team on the success of this massive undertaking: Trey Schultz who lead the migration of existing platforms and kept the schedule on track; Shannon Kerney and Lori Hansen who coordinated client communications; Michael Raiford who was the primary developer working with all new technology alongside the enterprise architecture team to get the functionality set up correctly.
One of the keys to such a smooth transition was the seamless organization and communication facilitated by a shared Teams channel created for the project. Here, team members were able to divide information between business users, development team users, documentation, onboarding, and release notes. Jill Krueger commented, “very little disruption occurred for clients when we switched over vendors, they were so in sync.”
Through the efforts of the E-Solutions product and development team, we have already seen greater efficiencies in Direct Messaging processes. Larger volumes of email messages can now be sent without human interaction whereas before, lists had to be manually moved around, published, and updated to keep customer communications delivered on time. The team has even planned for the future, creating custom internal APIs that are vendor agnostic and will simplify moving these Venture Access functions to another vendor should we ever need to change again in the future.
Something that seems as simple as consolidating email providers has had a major impact: Venture Solutions has realized $80k savings in licensing costs and was able to send 10 million email messages more during the period of January to July this year compared to 2021. These process improvements and efficiencies have made Venture Solutions a more powerful partner to our clients and set us up for future success.
