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The background

Road Haulage Association (RHA) is the UK’s only trade association dedicated solely to road haulage.

With a remit that encompasses campaigning, advice, training, information and business services for over 7,000 members, the effective and simultaneous management of multiple elements of the organisation is imperative in order for RHA to thrive and grow its membership.

However, after several years of unsuccessful attempts to deliver a viable solution that effectively supported the organisation’s trategic goals, internal perceptions of CRM were growing ever more negative and doubtful that a solution would be delivered.

After demonstrating that it could meet the RHA’s functional and operational requirements, and following a rigorous selection process, Silverbear won the contract to implement its flagship membership CRM system.


The project

From the outset, Silverbear understood that one of the key objectives was to change internal perceptions of CRM.

Prior to Silverbear’s appointment, there was a great deal of scepticism internally around CRM and its role in the RHA.

Working in close partnership with RHA, Silverbear conducted a functional requirements capture and a 'to-be' business process design and re-engineering programme, which demonstrated to RHA how Silverbear 365 could be used to grow the organisation and automate day-to-day tasks for employees.

The programme not only included the design of RHA's 'to-be' business processes, but also leveraged the knowledge and experience accrued from over 40 existing business process designs developed from working with other high profile associations.

With an exclusive background in supporting membership associations, Silverbear immediately began implementing its platform, which, having been built on Microsoft Dataverse, quickly helped RHA streamline and automate its processes, many of which were originally built around manual methods.

One of  RHA's key challenges was integration with its financial system, which required an upgrade and had no ability to directly link to any CRM platform. Similarly, a lack of internal resource prevented multiple people from testing the platform on a full time basis, which meant that testing had to be carried out by those with full time jobs around their day-today commitments.

Having encountered these issues in a membership environment before, Silverbear was able to match its delivery style and capability with RHA's own resource limitations, migrate its financial system to a fully automated platform and prevent disruption to RHA's operations.

In August 2018, 12 months after selecting Silverbear, RHA had fully integrated Silverbear 365, completed a comprehensive programme of digital transformation and dramatically changed internal perceptions of CRM.


The result

Since going live, RHA has:

01 - Access to a single view of its entire membership via one screen and one integrated system

02 - Taken its event management programme online via an easy-to-use events management interface

03 - Benefited from a fully connected and integrated CRM platform that supports immediate reporting on all elements of the organisation

04 - 100 per cent security across its entire organisation. Only those authorised to view and access specific information can do so

05 - Full diagnostics and troubleshooting capability. The level of intelligence and real time data provided by Silverbear 365 makes it easy to immediately identify faults instead of spending time cross referencing multiple systems and relying on the process of elimination to diagnose issues

The level of flexibility Silverbear provides has been instrumental in making this project a huge success and their consistency of style was really refreshing. We never once went through a helpdesk and the personal relationships developed over the course of the project have laid the foundations for a very strong partnership going forwards. The scepticism around CRM has gone and its value is now well understood across the organisation. We now have the tools in place to allow the RHA to achieve more as an organisation and we now look forward to growing our membership.


Stephen Hards

Head of IT, Road Haulage Association

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