At the JCC, one of our core commitments is, “It’s better here!” This serves as a clarion call for our never-ending pursuit of excellence in everything we do, fully recognizing that excellence is an ideal state that may be difficult to ever truly attain.

In the business of serving community, excellence begins with putting our customers in the center of all that we do. Prioritizing customer experience isn’t just about making customers happy in the moment; it’s about building long-term relationships, driving organizational growth and ensuring the longevity of the organization. At the JCC, we recognize the importance of applying this standard of excellence across the entire agency – from back of the house functions to front facing programs and services – to best ensure that our customers have a uniformly positive experience at every possible touchpoint.

It was our desire to improve the customer experience that drove our conversion to Traction Rec in December 2019 as we proudly wore T-shirts bearing the message: “Gaining Traction to Serve You Better!” Built upon the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Traction Rec (TREC) affords JCCs the opportunity to better understand our customers’ needs and interests and provides our customers with a host of self-service opportunities to improve their overall experience, including online program registration and online fitness classes.

Recently, we attended a national TREC-JCC user conference with more than 80 representatives from 35 JCCs located across North America. As one of the original JCCs to sign on with TREC as a Strategic Release Partner and a super user of the Traction Rec platform, we were invited to present at the conference along with our good friend and colleague, Rachel Koretsky, Founder & CEO of upace, about our integration of the powerful member engagement app with TREC. Our presentation at the conference described not only the technical glitches and hurdles encountered along the way but most importantly, how we worked with upace to customize an intuitive and engaging user interface, the way we communicated with our members about benefits of the app itself and how we have included assisting members download the mobile app into our new member onboarding process.

One of the upace/TREC innovations we are most proud of was done in support of our J Café older adult congregate lunch program offered through AgeWell at the JCC South Hills. Participants need to place their meal orders in advance, so we created a reservation system and approximately one third of our Age Well participants now book their lunches on upace. Folks love this new feature and feel as though the JCC is their own personal Door Dash. We can’t wait to bring this same level of convenience to our Squirrel Hill congregate meal program in the coming months!

We have also leveraged the integration between upace and TREC to more systematically measure member engagement. Through dashboards that we developed, we now gather comprehensive data on member referrals, fitness assessments, aquatics classes and group exercise consults, helping us to better understand our community and thus, serve everyone better.

We are so excited to be ahead of the curve, evolving with the best technology to serve our members. With these powerful tools, we can operate more efficiently, communicate better, help members manage their accounts, and more consistently provide the best possible experience to each and every one of our customers.

Wishing you and your families a Shabbat shalom,
Diane and Ben