Solutions Partner

Advantage user experience

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Advantage supports some of the most sophisticated business transactions our clients demand in the constantly evolving publishing marketplace. However, that sophistication must be met with an application experience that can be efficiently managed. Whether you are a publisher, subscription box provider or membership association, Advantage is designed to meet today’s demands for complex transactional handling in a highly configurable solution. From the simplest transactions to the broadest enterprise-wide operations, we understand that each member of your workforce needs to have the right features at their fingertips. With strategic use of Advantage’s powerful yet flexible offerings, you’ll be sure to set up your entire team for success. 

Designed with the user in mind

In today’s world, retaining staff is challenging and software must be both easy and intuitive to use.  Accordingly, Advantage offers users an individually configurable user interface (UI) that keeps users at their most productive. Users with the proper security settings can easily customize Advantage based on their personal preferences and needs for accessibility. They might curate their experience by changing the application's color scheme, or switch into dark mode, which can reduce eyestrain. Or perhaps they need even further help with visibility and navigation by enabling high contrast mode, which benefits users with low vision or other visual disabilities. With all these individualized offerings, Advantage gives users that empowering sense of control in the application, which makes for a more inviting and engaging user experience.

The information you need, when you need it

Advantage’s display settings can be configured to best suit your organization as well as your team’s day-to-day activities. The application provides a variety of flexible tools that can help you organize the flow and presentation of information. These display options, which can be set up for one person or an entire department, help you organize information so that users can most efficiently complete their tasks. First, you can identify the key views that need to be frequently accessed and “favorite” them (e.g., Customer Accounts Receivable). Next, you can decide how the information is best sorted, arranged and even displayed — perhaps choosing to remove content from the display that is not helpful or relevant. By prominently displaying the content your team needs for their work, you ensure they will stay productive throughout the day. 

Suppose you are a publisher of newspapers or magazines with advertising auditing requirements. You could decide that you want your staff to be able to easily view and work with circulation fields that help meet the requirements necessary for controlled publications — delayed starts, business demographics, questionnaire responses and other AMM related fields. To achieve this, your administrators can simply highlight these standard circulation field elements and group them together, making for easier and faster entry of your specialized subscriptions.

If you are a subscription box or book club membership provider, you probably want your staff to be able to instantly view a snapshot of your customers and all their subscriptions and memberships. Advantage’s highly configurable display features were designed with this intent in mind. Once set up, users can quickly and easily view a dynamic display of a book club customer’s information, which could include fulfillment history, shipping frequency, or their recurring billing information on record. And this type of client would want to hide the data elements relating to controlled circulation discussed previously. 

Sophisticated transaction handling … made simple

Although Advantage can handle all the complexities of subscription and membership management activity, your team shouldn’t have to. To help users come up to speed quickly, Advantage offers an extensive transactional design feature, allowing the creation of customized data entry paths for your users to follow. Essentially, Advantage helps you logically break down complicated transactional activities into several smaller steps. With use of this broad and powerful feature, you will increase your staff’s rate of learning and reduce costly training time.  

Here are some of the many kinds of transactional and entry activities that can be configured and tailored to your business: 

  • Entering and maintaining customer records.
  • Adding new, renewal and quote orders.
  • Adjusting customer subscriptions and memberships.
  • Managing campaign and promotional efforts.
  • Performing customer retention transactions.
  • Renewing print, digital and/or bundled subscriptions.
  • Adding and updating product offerings and inventory.
  • Maintaining association and book club memberships.

Each and every step of a transactional or entry activity can be customized. New field elements can be added, rearranged or — just as easily, hidden completely. You can even pre-fill certain entry fields for your users, saving them time and ensuring accuracy. Many fields and captions can even be renamed using your organization's familiar terminology. Adjust field colors and text styles to highlight the importance of certain elements. It’s all up to you! 

Automating your workflow

Advantage can also help you streamline workflow throughout your organization by use of automation. Our robust automation capabilities allow you to set up all kinds of intricate processing “behind the scenes.” You have the flexibility to decide which system events immediately activate the start of the next action. Here are some examples of the many processing tasks that Advantage can automate for you:

  • Send a customer service email (or text message) in response to a new order.
  • Resume a suspended subscription when payment is received. 
  • Perform system monitoring.
  • Initiate an internal meeting for issues that need immediate attention.
  • Update Salesforce or Dynamics CRM opportunities based on an interaction with acustomer (e.g., alerting the sales team that they should follow up with the customer).
  • Reset access to the digital content fulfillment system upon request ... right from Advantage!

Comprehensive meets configurable

In addition to the continued evolution of scale, security, integration and configurability in Advantage’s product features, we always take into account our customer’s experience. We remain committed to delivering a powerful product that meets both your consumers' complex needs and your users' accessibility.  

If you’d like more information or would like to request a demo, please contact Kelly at kelly.grace@advantagecs.com.