Chartered Institute of Environmental Health
“I used to spend up to 7 days a month on Direct Debit Admin. Now it takes about 4 hours.”
Zoe Beresford, Memberships Officer, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health
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Membership services, environmental health education and campaigning
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The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health is the membership and awarding body for environmental health. CIEH works tirelessly to set and raise standards to improve public health, supporting its members' professional development and influencing policy. CIEH also provides training, accreditation and community for environmental health professionals working across the public, private and third sector.
As part of its digital transformation, CIEH enlisted the help of transformation experts Trillium, who oversaw the entire project, including implementing a new CRM in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Trillium recommended GoCardless to CIEH as the best choice for collecting and managing payments.
Gavin Pollock, the Director and Co-founder of Trillium, explained why they were so keen to bring GoCardless on board:
In reality, GoCardless is the only solution out there that provides a fully outsourced solution for enabling total automation of Direct Debit processing. There are other alternatives but none that provide the same level of full end-to-end ability.
Leaving the old approach behind
Previously, CIEH stored all its members’ Direct Debit details in its CRM, which Head of IT Justin Turner identified as a security and compliance risk:
We weren’t comfortable relying on the application security to protect this sensitive data, but our old solution meant we had to handle it this way to keep everything running. With GoCardless we have mitigated that by completely removing it from our environment.
Security concerns aside, the previous method for setting up Direct Debits was causing memberships officer a monthly headache. “It was a very manual process, sending paper mandates, and often having to wait a month before receiving them back,” says Membership Officer Zoe Beresford.
Even when mandates were returned, Zoe would still have to send signed mandates to respective bank branches, which could mean another month before taking payment. All this together only accelerated the search for a new Direct Debit solution.
90% less payment admin
The transition to GoCardless was as straightforward as expected, and CIEH was quickly up and running with the new online system. The GoCardless integration also saved CIEH a costly bespoke solution that would have been needed with their old Direct Debit solution.
As Zoe explains, the difference in process between the previous solution and GoCardless is obvious:
Previously, I spent 6-7 days a month on all Direct Debit admin. Now, I just have to log in check the status of payments and make the occasional intervention. It now takes me 4-5 hours each month with GoCardless.
More time to focus on member experience
This vast reduction in admin freed up a great deal of Zoe’s time to focus on what she does best, making members happy. She has used her time to help CIEH implement a new education and enrolment programme, something she never would have had time for previously.
Looking back on the switch, Zoe is more than happy with the outcome:
GoCardless is the standard for Direct Debit. It allows us to meet member preferences, has excellent reporting and visibility, and drastically reduces human error.
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