What’s Behind Rievent’s 99% Client Retention Rate?

Since we first released Rievent in 2000, 99% of the clients who selected Rievent as their CME management system are still using it. That’s 20 years with nearly zero clients who have switched to another platform.

In the B2B software world, that kind of customer retention is a real rarity.

We’re humbled that so many CME providers and learners continue to find value in our products. Also, we think we know what’s behind our 99% client retention rate.

Reliability

In the CME space, there’s a common thread that unites our competitors’ platforms. And yes, we’re including proprietary homegrown systems.

They’re glitchy. That’s what they have in common.

By the time CME providers come to us, many have come to expect that their business software will freeze up, crash often, and behave inexplicably (and annoyingly) on a regular basis. They’re shocked when they see that Rievent isn’t like that.

“It just works” may seem like a boring feature. But when you’re up against a lot of platforms that don’t work when people really need them to, it’s a major plus.

Every time clients access Rievent, they’re confident it will work the way they need it to. They know this not only because it’s stated in our strong SLA, but because their experience with the platform is that it consistently performs.

CME and healthcare CE focus

Even today, many CME providers are stuck with generalist business applications that are designed to manage various kinds of administration. But a generalist office admin app is like the diner that serves American, Korean, Mexican, Chinese, and Greek food. The menu has a lot on it, but none of it is particularly delicious.

From Day One, we built Rievent to serve the exact needs of providers and learners in the CME and healthcare CE market.

That’s our primary focus, and the platform does everything these users need it to do. After all, CME providers have administrative requirements that simply don’t exist outside of their industry. Among other things, they have to:

• Collect activity data
• Generate ACCME PARS, ANCC NARS, and/or ACPE reports
• Create certificates
• Maintain learner transcripts
• Publish content
• Register event attendees

Generalist software is unlikely to handle all of those things for them, even when it claims the “learning management system” title. If you’re a CME provider, there’s nothing you could want your software to do that Rievent doesn’t already have built in.

And when new features are needed – like when we added automated MOC reporting and fulfillment – we make  them available to all of our clients as a standard feature or an option.

Time

Time is perhaps the greatest benefit you’ll get from a quality CME management system. When you’re not constantly dealing with less-than-capable software, you’ll have…

• More time to develop new CME activities
• More time to analyze and evaluate existing activities
• More time to engage with your CME data, rather than hunt for it.

The list goes on and on! In theory, you’d get this from any CME management system.  But since most of your options are either buggy or lacking in CME-specific features (see above), time happens to be an area where Rievent shines.

With Rievent, you’re not going to spend hours working with your software trying to get it to do what you want it to do.

One of the biggest reasons CME providers can’t imagine doing business without Rievent is that they’ve rebuilt their processes around the time they’ve gained back.

Adaptability and scalability

When you’re ready to add a new type of CME to your repertoire, Rievent accommodates. There’s no new software you need to buy.

We’ve seen this a lot over the years as organizations that previously relied on live  meetings started offering more enduring activities and webinars. Previously, they used Rievent to manage CME live events. Now they use it for events and online activities.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, even more CME providers have been adapting CME to the virtual space using features that Rievent already had built in. Another thing we’ve witnessed since the beginning of the pandemic – and this is something we always knew was possible but that the pandemic confirmed for us – is Rievent’s ability to scale.

As soon as more CME providers started taking their activities online, they’ve required significantly more web services than before – and all at once! Rievent’s scalable architecture runnin on Amazon Web Services is designed to scale for practically unlimited users.

Dedicated support

Organizations using Rievent get a dedicated account manager. It’s not a call center and we don’t play hot potato with support calls. Instead, you get a person who knows you and your business.

The thing is, clients almost never need support.

They usually don’t need to because we:

• Built software around the specific needs, preferences, and requests of our CME user base
• Follow rigorous quality assurance standards, so the software practically never behaves in a manner that isn’t expected
• Offer comprehensive training for all new customers, so you know the ins and outs of all the ways you’ll use the software
• Publish detailed support literature (www.rievent.support.com) that answers pretty much every question you may have

Basically, clients don’t have issues using Rievent. When they do, they can usually solve them without our intervention. And when they need us, we’re always there to address the issue right away.

We could be wrong, but we think those are the reasons we have a 99% retention rate.

While we haven’t polled our clients on why they stick around, we have a pretty good idea about why they like Rievent so much. Compared to whatever they were doing before (or, let’s face it, whatever software they might be using otherwise), Rievent is more reliable, flexible, and comprehensive.

Plus, they almost never need help using it.

If anything, our message to other B2B software providers would have to be something along the lines of, “Build software that always works, does what users expect it to do, and grows with your clients.” That’s what’s worked for us over the years! It’s worked even better for the CME organizations that use our products.