New membership Web site for The Financial Services Forum

 

The Challenge

The Financial Services Forum has had a website presence since its formation in 2000. The website offered general information and an area for members to access the latest thinking in fi nancial services marketing. The organisation had the ability to make simple changes to content in-house, but this was not adaptable to their needs.
They wanted to offer their members much more. The Financial Services Forum wanted to fully utilise data from Salesforce, their customer relationship management system (CRM), to provide a flexible and intuitive website that allowed members to share data and focus on particular areas of interest.

The Financial Services Forum found the answer in EPiServer CMS, a web content management system that offers the full range of content management tools to enable a website to be published quickly and simply. It has the added advantage of allowing for full integration with a CRM system to provide a dynamic and personalised website to members.

The Solution: EPiServer CMS and Integration

“EPiServer CMS provided the best fi t. It offered a perfect solution, as EPiServer CMS is not only a CMS product but a platform built on .NET, which provides a solid base upon which to build and integrate with third party systems”, says Justin Masters, Technical Director at Netcel. Indeed for The Financial Services Forum the result is an
easy-to-use content management system that allows seamless
integration with their Salesforce CRM. The relaunched website, www.thefsforum.co.uk, allows The Financial Services Forum to update members’ data directly into the Salesforce CRM. Members benefi t through the enhanced services, such as the ability to update and manage their profile and membership details online. This profile control allows personalised content to be delivered to members. So using EPiServer categorisation allows personalised content to be delivered to members both from within EPiServer and through Salesforce. The ease with which EPiServer CMS integrates with Salesforce allows search results to be presented as categorised content presenting structured search results from multiple data sources. EPiServer CMS is able to handle multiple tiers of membership by restricting access tocertain pages  depending upon membership level. The website currently has three levels, but EPiServer CMS allows further membership levels to be introduced as required.
“Tailoring content to our members is proving extremely effective. We have seen our visitor numbers increase substantially and there is greater interest in our events and membership services”, says Richard Nolan, Operations Director at the
Financial Services Forum.

EPiServer CMS is simple and easy to use. Content managers can edit and publish pages quickly. But they can also add, delete and move menus so that the entire site can be restructured in future without the need for additional development costs. The platform provides considerable fl exibility and scalability for future expansion.

The benefits: Cost effective and future proof

The user-friendly EPiServer CMS platform gives The Financial Services Forum a range of benefi ts both to members using the website and to staff updating the website day-to-day. In addition to the introduction of personalised content and integration with Salesforce, cost savings were gained through centralising databases and so reducing the time required to populate the CRM, website and email marketing system. Duplicating data entry and associated synchronisation issues are now avoided. So time and money are being saved as the website content is updated behind the scenes via Salesforce and by editors at the Forum using EPiServer CMS.
EPiServer CMS also allows for rapid application development.

As Justin Masters says, “We were able to deliver the solution quickly and efficiently, but also offer excellent scalability and flexibility for the future. For example, EPiServer CMS has out-of-the-box functionality, such as the option for multilingual
sites that can be utilised in due course.”

The Financial Services Forum wanted their new site to assist in retaining existing members and gaining new members. This goal was achieved by providing a highly usable site that provides the features and functionality required by members to source information while also interacting with fellow members.

“Using EPiServer CMS, Netcel has helped to deliver all of our requirements and more, providing a cost-effective, value for money solution in the process”, adds Richard Nolan.