"We used to spend a lot of time hand-holding and getting people up to speed with our old system, but that time has been dramatically reduced."Brad Wheeling,
Marketing Manager
Challenge
Getting non-technical users up to speed quickly.
Solution
EditLive!, the Word-like rich text editor with familiar, easy-to-use features.
Benefits
- Happier customers with less time spent handling customer support questions
Background
Concordia Technology Solutions (CTS) is the technology division of Concordia Publishing House, a non-profit organization that has been serving the needs of American churches since 1869. In 2004, CTS released MemberConnect, a Web-based communication and coordination tool that allows churches and sports teams to quickly and easily manage their online communications.
MemberConnect is a Java application that offers a complete website through its proprietary content management framework. Teams and churches pay Concordia a monthly fee to build their own website and manage their own content online. Websites such as Still Water Church and Lou Fusz Strikers Soccer Club keep members up to date on events and activities using MemberConnect. The service connects the communities of more than 650 churches and 500 sports teams across the United States.
"EditLive! is used within the Concordia framework to enter and edit web content such as church activities, events, discussions, online newsletters and documents," said Brad Wheeling, Marketing Manager at Concordia Technology Solutions.
The Challenge
Before discovering EditLive!, Concordia struggled with an incompatible WYSIWYG editor that forced end-users to load pop up screens in order to operate a PHP-based HTML editor inside their Java framework.
"It was really confusing for our customers and we spent a lot of time on support," said Rob Stoecklein, the Senior Developer with Concordia Publishing. "And I don't think the HTML generated by the editor was as good as it should have been."
They searched for a solution that would offer a more compatible web editing environment for their hosted websites.
The Solution
"We reviewed a lot of products in seeking a solution - products like Ektron, FCK Editor, Cute Editor, and many others," said Rob. "We were really pleased with the quality of the HTML produced by EditLive!."
Concordia was also impressed with the ease in which EditLive! integrated with their website application. "It has a really nice configuration method through the XML file so you can set it up and get it to work the way you need it to - I really like that as a developer," said Rob.
The end users of Concordia's web publishing software are typically not tech-savvy. They need to be able to update information on their church or sports club websites in a timely matter, but they don't want to learn complex web applications to do so.
EditLive!'s interface is seamlessly integrated within Concordia's software and looks
and feels much like
Microsoft Word. The familiar editing interface allows end users to easily
insert and format text and images, spell check their content, and create hyperlinks.
"We used to spend a lot of time hand-holding and getting people up to speed with our old system, but that time has been dramatically reduced. We now get a lot happier phone calls, a lot shorter phone calls, and a lot fewer phone calls!" said Brad.
As a non-profit organization, Concordia Publishing House is particularly concerned with customer satisfaction. "There's one thing for sure, EditLive! helps us keep our customers a lot better than our previous solution!" said Brad.
