In November 2022, Foresters Financial, a Fund Management company established in 1849, partnered with Newpath to commence their digital transformation journey.
With a 3 year strategic plan in hand, Newpath worked with the Foresters executive team to devise a technology roadmap in alignment with their business strategy.

The strategy sought to;

“Build a digital ecosystem that propels Foresters Financial into the next decade as the fund enhances its corporate membership offering. The digital transformation vision positions Foresters as a digitally-led market leader delivering exceptional online member experiences; single member view; and streamlined, scalable, automated digital processes.”

With this vision in mind, Newpath would undertake a Discovery engagement followed by a program of transformational projects.

Kicking off with a 20-day Digital Transformation Discovery engagement, Newpath’s highly experienced business and technology consultants worked closely with the Foresters ELT to devise a technology roadmap and transformation plan. Together, we created a digital transformation vision and set of objectives. 

In particular, a key strategic objective stated the organisation’s desire to be highly member centric. As we drilled into this objective during the discovery process, we validated the need for the business to implement a CRM offering a single-customer view unifying member funds-under-management data with customer communications touch points. 

Following the discovery, Newpath commenced work on the CRM project stream in April 2023 where we configured the Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service and Marketing (Customer Insights Journeys) modules. Integration with third party systems and the initial go-live set for September. Newpath provided user training and change management services to ensure a smooth go-live process for the member services, sales and marketing teams at Foresters.

In the discovery phase, Newpath uncovered operational challenges with many customer service, sales and operational processes being run on spreadsheets. 

By analysing Foresters’ business processes and identifying ideal customer experience, we were able to identify opportunities to streamline and digitise often manual and laborious processes across each department. Ultimately, Newpath produced a detailed Discovery document that identified a Digital Transformation Strategy highlighting the need for CRM implementation. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 emerged as the solution to meet Foresters’ strategic objectives. It’s highly customisable framework would effectively enhance, streamline and often automate business processes such as customer service enquiries, leads/opportunity management, and communications. 

The Discovery document was packaged as a Digital Transformation Business Case for Foresters Financial’s board to consider prior to undertaking the program of works.

Upon validation of the transformation model established during Discovery, Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service and Customer Insights (marketing) platforms were configured under a semi-agile framework. This approach offered the Foresters team with appropriate flexibility throughout the engagement to shape the solution while performing iterative solution testing. 

With decades of member data to pull into the CRM customer view from the funds management system, Newpath developed a robust and secure data ELT web service to provide a single-customer-view within the Accounts and Contacts views in Dynamics 365. This proved to be a high value outcome for the Member Services team as they could better service member enquiries without traversing systems or navigating multiple spreadsheets. 

Dynamics 365’s integration with Outlook, Teams and Sharepoint were also configured as crucial tools to support client requests while improving collaboration and knowledge share practices across the organisation.

The implementation of the CRM is a foundational step in the organisation’s broader Digital Transformation program. Even as a foundational project, the team at Foresters Financial have rapidly improved their digital maturity and are now seeking opportunities to better unify data sources, offering further enhancements to customer experiences. 

The transition from spreadsheets to a full integrated office and CRM system has provided many efficiencies, allowing their member services and sales teams to focus on important communications tasks while taking advantage of features such as automated workflows, task management, case management, email queue triage, communications templates, marketing automation, and much more.