How The Cape May County Herald streamlined operations and boosted customer satisfaction with SCS’s Community Advertising System

2/14/2024

SITUATION

The Cape May County Herald in Rio Grande, New Jersey, has seen many changes throughout its more than fifty years of delivering community journalism to the area’s residents and visitors. One notable change concerned the multimedia publisher’s own in-office workflow. Previously, employees had to use multiple systems for billing, which made client changes difficult to track and manage.

According to Molly Richard, the publisher’s Accounts Receivable (AR) Manager and Classified Advertising and Subscriptions Manager, “We had two freestanding AR departments billing out of one building. Customers
who were running two types of advertising were getting two completely different bills from two completely different systems. It was confusing to the customer, and it was a bear to manage.”

That confusion, paired with the difficulty of getting the issues resolved, put a strain on client relationships.

“Answering a simple question was a difficult, time-consuming, exhausting job,” Molly said. “If customers needed to understand specific things about their invoices or statements, they needed to talk to an AR manager. If they needed to understand specific things about the buy that was involved in becoming an invoice, they needed to talk to the sales team. Multiple departments answering a single customer question just wasn’t opportune for the staff or the customers.”

The publisher knew it needed to do away with its multiple systems and streamline its process into one powerful tool. That tool was SCS’s Community Advertising System (CAS).

SOLUTION

SCS’s CAS is a managed service, advertising and production solution that includes order entry, billing, layout, pagination, and ad building tools. While Cape May County Herald employees are still learning about all they can do with the robust system, Molly reports that CAS has already made a positive impact now that managing and finding information and responding to customer inquiries is easier than ever.

“I now have one location to check when answering clients’ questions,” Molly said. “Clients could be asking about their ad buy, the invoice numbers, the order numbers… I can give them any information they want. I don’t have to ask anyone else. The clients don’t have to wait. That one thing alone—to me, as a customer service professional for a very long career—is the ideal scenario.”

Employees can provide customers with such detailed answers ever since SCS helped the publisher create new order and invoice forms in CAS. “Our new order and invoice forms have made a big difference in our
accounts receivable department,” Molly said. “We hadn’t realized how much attention to details—like whether to split or lump certain fees or to add features like vendor IDs and account numbers to vouchers—would aid in managing AR. Thanks to the staff at SCS, we can now offer many order and invoice options and manage these details effectively within the system.”

Since installing CAS and using the new forms, the Cape May County Herald has been able to do more, and do it quickly.

“Thanks to SCS, we’re saving a lot of time and room for error in the long run,” Molly said. “We can now post classified ads and public notices more quickly than we could before, and customers can have more design features. Photo and logo handling for both classified advertisements and obituaries are more easily managed, sized, and placed. This is now just a faster, more responsive place to work. I think CAS has been good for every department.”

Molly has also been impressed with SCS’s customer service.

“The elegant solutions that the SCS team has been able to provide us have been amazing,” Molly said. “The team has such vast knowledge based on their user interactions with other newspapers. It’s a real pleasure to work with them. They’re responsive, they’re insightful. Their answers are direct and concise, and their instructions are clear. I’ve been delighted.”