“You made it so simple.”
It’s a compliment every funeral professional would like to hear. You’re serving families at one of the most emotionally draining and mentally demanding times of their lives. The last thing you want to do is add to their stress with purchasing pressures and complicated processes. That’s why Terrybear Urns & Memorials created Memory of a Lifetime® — the simplest and most efficient way to provide families with the perfectly-personalized products they want and need.
The comment above is indicative of the feedback the Terrybear team has received since launching Memory of a Lifetime®, a proprietary digital platform featuring the firm’s vast line of quality products, in 2019. Words like “simple,” “easy,” “convenient,” and “helpful” are words Nikki Nordeen, Terrybear’s Executive Director of Client Success & Brand Growth, loves to hear.
“Memory of a Lifetime® started as a way for Terrybear to decrease delivery times and gain efficiencies in our proofing process for personalized products,” Nordeen explains. “Our digital proofing option made it possible for Terrybear to deliver products on a next-day basis.”
Constant, continuous improvement
Terrybear has continued to improve the Memory of a Lifetime® experience for its network of trusted distributors and the deathcare professionals they serve. The most recent enhancements, designed to make the portal available to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere, include a family-facing online ordering option, complete with customized branding and retail pricing for individual funeral homes. The new portal helps Terrybear to achieve its primary goal: Making it easier for funeral directors to offer more to the families they serve.
“With Memory of a Lifetime®, funeral directors can focus on all the other things they have to focus on,” Nordeen says. “They don’t have to worry about one little thing, like getting a proof of a personalized product approved. We have taken that worry off of their plates.”
In the past, ordering a personalized engraved product could take days, or sometimes even weeks, depending on the time to finalize a design and receive proof approval from the family and place that order with a Terrybear distributor via faxes and phone calls. Nordeen knew there had to be a better solution.
“We challenged ourselves to create a digital proofing option where the funeral home could create the configuration with the family in the arrangement room so they could sign off on it right then and there,” she recalls.
Family-friendly
While each and every Memory of a Lifetime® improvement is designed to benefit funeral directors, the families you serve are the ultimate beneficiaries. With this in mind, Terrybear has updated the Memory of a Lifetime® portal with easily-searchable descriptions and artistic lifestyle photography to provide a family-friendly online shopping experience.
“Over time we’ve adjusted Memory of a Lifetime® to be more of a consumer experience and less of a business-to-business experience,” Nordeen says. “Unlike many of the sites out there, it’s not just technical information. We want to paint families a picture and show them what a memorial product will look like in their home.”
One of the most unique aspects of Terrybear’s Memory of a Lifetime® portal is that it incorporates every participant in the sales channel, including the distributor, the funeral home, and the families they serve. And when families or funeral directors have questions, they’re supported by not only their trusted distributor, but also by a team of dedicated customer service professionals.
“The challenge with online ordering is making sure funeral directors keep that family connection and in-person time they love,” Nordeen says. “So I think of our customer service team as a crossroads between that. If a customer or a funeral home has an issue, they can reach us directly, and talk to a live person. They can’t do that when they order an urn from Amazon or Etsy.”
Feedback is appreciated and incorporated
Listening to feedback from every individual in the sales process — distributors, funeral directors, and families — is important to every member of the Terrybear team, and is often the impetus for major improvements. For example, the digital portal was created in response to distributors’ feedback about improving the proof approval process – by offering this live configuration tool, funeral directors are able to get the personalization proof approvals during the arrangement conference, often saving them hours of follow up.
To better meet the needs of funeral directors, Terrybear added customized branding and pricing flexibility to the Memory of a Lifetime® portal. Each site is personalized to look like part of the funeral home’s website, and funeral homes can elect to upload their own retail prices to further customize the site.
When it comes to shopping the large product assortment on Memory of a Lifetime, funeral directors can rest assured that families won’t have to wait to receive a particular item. The Memory of a Lifetime® portal offers a live look at Terrybear’s available inventory, and includes a filter showing if a product is out of stock — something that was extremely important in past years due to pandemic-induced supply chain issues.
Of Terrybear’s nearly 800 items on the site, almost 500 can be personalized with custom engraving using the company’s proprietary QuickProofsTM technology. Allowing families and directors to create their own personalized messages or tributes online anytime through Memory of a Lifetime® has led to more accurate, efficient, and faster-than-ever product delivery — families can now expect items to arrive when and where they are needed. The site even provides tracking information.
So much more to come
Nordeen and the Terrybear team are always looking for new ways to help funeral directors offer more to their families, so you can definitely expect bigger and better things from Terrybear and the Memory of a Lifetime® portal.
“When it comes to technology, there’s never a final destination,” Nordeen says. “It’s just constant, continuous improvement.”
You can try out Terrybear’s Memory of a Lifetime® digital portal at absolutely no cost, and trust that Terrybear will deliver the quality, service, and support you’ve come to expect. To get started, simply visit Terrybear.com/join to register. If you need additional assistance do not hesitate to call Terrybear directly at 1.888.588.8767, they will ensure you get set up to begin using this free tool.
Written by: Patricia Hartley
