The Ceramic Tile Education Foundation was founded in 1996 in Pendleton, South Carolina as an educational resource for architects, designers, construction professionals and sales associates in the ceramic tile industry. As part of their mission, they launched the Ceramic Tile Installer (CTI) program in 2008, producing 1625 certified CTIs through January 2020.
The program’s budget is extremely tight, and is dependent on a select number of highly qualified installation experts and volunteers to keep it running. As part of that effort, the organization has set aggressive growth goals for 2020 and needed a partner who could help optimize the CTI registration and payment process - much of which was done manually as recently as two years ago.
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Before coordinating with DepositFix, there were several ongoing challenges faced by the CTEF team. While they were actively using HubSpot, they found that they consistently didn’t have the transparency and visibility needed to track payments. To start, payments were frequently made offline, by phone. Taking digital payments limited the ability to handle registrations online - the result was that a tremendous amount of hours were spent just processing online payments and coordinating with registrants. There was no integration with HubSpot for payment activity and payment history, meaning they had to carefully watch their PayPal account to know when a charge had been processed and then log it to the customer’s account.
The result was a time-consuming process in which a significant number of hours were spent checking and managing payment information, and event registration process lacked the core data needed to inform who had paid, who had visited key landing pages and when those actions occurred.
CTEF chose DepositFix to help alleviate these challenges, allowing them to track who signed up and when a payment was made all from within the same interface. They almost immediately started using workflows to manage their follow-up efforts and send a follow-up when payment wasn’t completed as expected after registration. This effectively closed the loop on their registration efforts, increasing the number of people who completed payment and streamlining the process end-to-end.
Online payments for Certification registration was just 10% of total payments in 2017 - the rest were handled manually. In 2019, after implementing DepositFix, that number jumped to 53%. Today, a greater percentage of those registering online complete the payment process at the point of registration instead of calling in later to do so, because it is so seamless.
Throughout the process, DepositFix has worked as a dedicated partner to help CTEF not just address existing issues, but develop new processes that will enable them to continue growing in 2020 and beyond.
“DepositFix made us less scrappy and much more nimble - able to track who signed up, when they signed up, and ensure payment happened with much less manual effort.“
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The CTEF team was able to complete a series of different activities at this time as well, including their first time participating in #GivingTuesday.
Through the end of 2019, even at their modest pace of existing growth, they were able to save an average of 2% from not manually processing payments. In 2020, with increased efforts and an aggressive year-end goal, CTEF expects to save between 6% and 13%.
