Overview

CPJ Field has been providing funeral services for more than three centuries. Still owned and managed by the Field family, this modern company operates from around 50 locations.

The Challenge

In a drive for greater automation, business visibility and profitability ahead of expansion plans, CPJ commissioned Red River to advise and design a solution to run their business and give the Funeral Directors the “time to care”, that is, perform their prime function. An additional aim was to drive customers to their website through remembrance pages, donations, obituaries and customer portals. The system’s core function was the organisation of events, namely funerals and their related logistics and correspondence.

The Process

CPJ had grown through acquisition and wanted to bring a cohesiveness and community culture to the organisation supported and promoted through a digital platform. The brand of the organisation was also being relaunched to reflect common values across the business. Red River were invited to join the team in exploring the digital transformation of the business and creating a roadmap to repivot, disrupt and widen the organisation’s offering in a sector which was becoming increasingly price driven rather than service driven.

Although CPJ were a significant organisation, there was no internal technical function or digital-focussed employees. The team ranged in levels of digital competence and willingness which meant that the solutions we created needed to be super-intuitive and engaging for the internal team, partners and customers.

The Solution

We introduced a challenge to the sector’s status quo and a way forward which took CPJ’s business and made it a digital leader.

We launched eFD in CPJ’s business. We continued with our prioritised roadmap to develop further phases of functionality. Administration overhead has been drastically cut for the business and the company has grown significantly without increasing headcount. CPJ’s digital transformation enabled them to seamlessly adopt to remote working during Covid-19 and still grow significantly.

We went even further…

In our initial visioning meeting, we realised there was a market gap for a platform developed with sector knowledge and technical ingenuity. Red River proposed this in 2017 and developed a separate product company to sell this SaaS platform and Seker Tech was created. Launched in 2018 it has reached a dominant position by digitising the market in this sector, counting many Coop divisions in its customer base. Currently the system has managed over 30,000 arrangements having increased from 10,000 in 2019.