| The New Norm

Throughout 2020, Anu believes SRS provided her firm a sense of normalcy in an otherwise abnormal year.

"No one was ready for this. We didn’t plan for something like this ... but having the right tools at the right time played a vital role in our business."

As the Director of IT, Anu faced a big challenge getting East Lawn up and running in a virtual environment. She and her team utilized a variety of different tools from SRS to continue serving families. Most notable for her were FamilyLink, E-Signature, and E-Pay.

"E-Pay has not just made our funeral directors’ lives easy, but our accounting team benefits from it a lot too," she said. "It just constantly collects all kinds of credit card payments that is entered directly into SRS, which eliminates double data entry ... so it saves a lot of time for both the funeral director and the family but at the same time the accounting team benefits from it too."

Anu leaned on webinars hosted by SRS to help train the end users on her team so that they could make the most of the tools they were using. And now, the East Lawn team has gotten so comfortable with these tools, she believes it will be the new norm going forward.

"FamilyLink played a very vital role in our business and still plays a very vital role because I think today this is a new norm that going forward this is how we’re going to be making arrangements," she said.

| Innovations with Bar Coding

At Porter Loring Mortuaries, Daniel and his team relied on SRS throughout 2020 to ensure that everyone was on the same page.

"When things got shut down at the beginning, we were basically working part-time shifts and SRS was pretty important to that because while we were not in the office we were still able to follow up on things, schedule things, and make sure that the alternating team had the information that they needed," he said.

Their team utilized Bar Coding in new ways – they used it to see where decedents were in their care, but also which staff member was responsible for them and where that staff member was.

"We know where the physical person is at any given time as far as the decedent, but also the staff that's moving that person so if there's ever a question we can always go back to the bar code on the client summary tab and see at what time all of these things happened," he said.

Bar Coding also allowed them to help train new staff on the correct way to process a decedent in their care. It showed them exactly what the next steps were and ensured that everything was done in the correct order.

The Porter Loring team also relied on several other tools, including their new SRS Website, E-Pay, and Mobile.9.

"Our families were still served, and to them it appeared seamless," he said.

| Pivoting to Virtual Arrangements

For Josh and his team at Wilkerson-Hatch-Bailey, it was imperative that they be able to serve families at the same level as they had before the pandemic hit.

"I’m thankful that SRS had the tools necessary for us to pivot to virtual arrangements during the pandemic," he said. "We have been able to maintain the same level of service for our families."

One important thing that SRS was able to help with in this regard was providing remote access to client files.

"During the pandemic, we had to alternate working from home and the ability to have access to our client files remotely was lifesaving," he said. "As a society, we have come accustomed to having information at our fingertips, SRS has created that same experience for funeral professionals.”

But SRS did more than just help the Wilkerson-Hatch-Bailey team – they helped their families, too. With E-Signature, Josh and his team were able to give their families a way to sign documents from anywhere.

"Before SRS for a remote arrangement, we would email or fax the paperwork to the family and then the family would have to print out the paperwork and scan and email it back," he said. "Not all families had the necessary equipment at home to do this, so some families had to go to a local businesses that provided these services. Now families sign the paperwork from their phone or computer.”