CPLED Replaces Shared Inboxes with Comm100 Ticketing & Messaging

The Numbers

• 74% faster ticket resolution (April-August 2026)
• 38% faster first response (April-August 2026)
• 10,700+ tickets resolved (March-September 2026)
• 100 reopened tickets (<1% reopen rate, only 100 reopened from 10.7k created)

“Right from choosing Comm100 to orientation to training and to implementation, it’s been a smooth process, to the point where we didn’t have to do any change management.” – Swapan Goel, Business Systems and Data Analyst, CPLED

The Organization

The Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education, known as CPLED, is the non-profit body responsible for the Bar admission training program that aspiring lawyers must complete before they can practise in a growing list of Canadian jurisdictions. Its flagship program, the Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP), is competency-based rather than lecture-based, built around simulation, transactional learning, and assessment against a defined competency framework.

CPLED was founded in 2004 by Canada’s prairie law societies, who agreed that a shared Bar admission program would serve new lawyers better than four separate ones. PREP itself is much newer.

The program was piloted in 2019, launched in 2020 to roughly 800 students across four jurisdictions, and has since become the approved Bar admission training program in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Nunavut. CPLED also runs programs for internationally trained lawyers working toward their Certificate of Qualification through the National Committee on Accreditation.

The organization is now heading into its largest expansion so far. In September 2026, the Law Society of British Columbia adopts PREP in place of the Professional Legal Training Course it has run since 1984. CPLED expects that change to take enrolment to roughly 1,600 candidates across six participating jurisdictions.
Supporting those candidates falls to a small internal team. Swapan Goel is CPLED’s Business Systems and Data Analyst, responsible for selecting and implementing the systems the organization runs on and for training staff to use them. Samansa Yi works on the Learning Management System team, managing course access for candidates and handling the technical questions that come with it. Between registration, program delivery, assessment, and contractor coordination, most of that work arrives as email.

The Challenges

“As our organization grows, we have more staff, more employees, and we can’t all just go into a basic email platform and start taking tickets, because that counts for human error.” – Swapan Goel

A Shared Inbox at Capacity

CPLED ran candidate and contractor communication out of a Microsoft email platform. That worked while the organization was small. It stopped working as jurisdictions and headcount were added.

“CPLED was a new organization. We were in the very initial phase,” Swapan said. “We were just using a Microsoft integrated email platform. But as we grew, with British Columbia and other stakeholders joining in, we needed a more organized approach to get our emails and tickets sorted.”

The failure mode was the one every shared inbox eventually produces. Nobody could tell what had been picked up and what had not.

Missed and Duplicated Emails

CPLED holds itself to a 24-hour general response time. Before the move, there was no mechanism to confirm whether the team was meeting it. The recurring problems were:

• Missed messages: emails that nobody claimed, with no way to spot them
• Duplicated effort: two staff members unknowingly working the same email
• Invisible response times: no tracking, so the 24-hour standard could not be measured
• Lost messages: emails moved or deleted by mistake during manual assignment

“There were issues where emails would get missed, or two people would start working on them,” Swapan said. “That affected productivity because there was no way to track response times. People were simply replying whenever they could.”

Samansa described the same problem from inside the daily workflow.

“Before, the emails in Outlook were manually assigned to the responsible person, so that would slow us down. Sometimes the emails got moved or deleted by mistake.”

Tickets Stalling in the Wrong Department

Without routing, a message that arrived in the wrong place stayed in the wrong place, sometimes for weeks.

Inconsistent Replies

Consistency was as much of a concern as speed. CPLED communicates policy, deadlines, and registration requirements to candidates who are being assessed against them, so wording matters.

“If your department has five employees but they are all responding with different replies to the same question, that doesn’t look good on an organization,” Swapan said. “So we were looking for a platform that had integrated responses within the platform.”

No Reporting

CPLED’s volume is seasonal. Registration periods load one team; program delivery loads another. Traditional email gave Swapan no way to quantify any of it.

“Before, I had no way to pull that up from the traditional email system,” he said.

Requests from managers for volume data meant manual counting, or estimates.

Why CPLED Chose Comm100

CPLED evaluated several vendors. Two things separated Comm100.

The first was Canadian ownership and data residency, which matters for an organization administering a regulated professional program on behalf of provincial law societies.

The second was the fact that with Comm100, they got a unified platform instead of having to use disparate tools.

“It was just one whole integrated platform, which was great for our ticketing and emailing,” Swapan said.

CPLED deployed Comm100 Ticketing & Messaging as the core system, with Comm100 Outreach alongside it for planned communication to whole cohorts.

The Solutions

Routing Rules

CPLED built routing on subject lines and contact lists, so incoming email reaches the right department without anyone triaging it manually.

“The system is automatically routing them to the correct departments, and people are just grabbing the tickets from their department,” Swapan said. “We don’t have clutter in our views. We don’t see anybody else’s emails. So that also decreases human error with responding to a wrong person. Routing rules have helped our team immensely.”

Samansa pointed to a piece of the routing behaviour that works without any configuration at all.

“One nice thing I found about Comm100 is that if I responded to that person, then the next ticket when they respond back to us will be assigned to me automatically, without even setting up the routing rules.”

That continuity matters when a candidate’s issue takes more than one exchange to resolve. The person who understands the context is the person who receives the reply.

Canned Messages

Canned responses gave CPLED a single approved answer to every recurring question, retrievable by shortcut.

“Those have been really helpful with cutting out response time, standardizing our responses to the stakeholders, and just making sure that we have our policies and everything templated within the platform,” Swapan said. “So that we are not missing anything or quoting anything that is not supposed to be quoted externally.”

Tags and Contact Lists

The old system had produced a familiar sprawl of individual filing habits. “We used to put them in folders, but then everybody would make their own folders, and we didn’t know where the information was stored. There were 10 different names of the same folder,” Swapan said. Tags replaced that with one shared vocabulary the whole team can search.

CPLED also uploads a contact list for each program once registration closes, with custom fields carrying candidate identifiers.

“There are some students who have no last names or whatever, and we are just trying to find them in the system, and it takes us five minutes,” Swapan said. “But with the contact list, the student ID is right there and we can just pull them up.”

For Samansa, having candidate context attached to the ticket is the clearest departure from Outlook.

“We can get priority set up, we can get a status set up, and for that ticket we can get the information of the candidate, who they are, what intake they’re in,” she said. “In Outlook we need to go to our spreadsheet to remember who that person is. But with an intake of 600 people, that’s almost impossible for us to remember.”

Bulk Reply

Technical problems in an assessment period generate the same email fifty times over. CPLED now answers them in one action.

“If there is a technical issue and everybody’s freaking out about an assignment, we can just batch reply 50 emails,” Swapan said. “Before it was replying to them individually. Comparing that to replying in one go to 50 emails, that’s just amazing.”

Outreach Campaigns

Bulk reply handles the unplanned moments. Planned communication to a whole cohort runs through Comm100 Outreach, which CPLED uses for:

• Intake welcome emails: sent to every registrant at the start of a new intake
• Contractor form campaigns: requests to complete required paperwork
• Vendor registration: onboarding contractors into CPLED’s systems

“We’ll just set up one email and it’s templated, which helps us keep things standardized. We’ll use the same welcome email, just change the intake names,” Swapan said. “And that way it just stays there. If we need to use it in the next six months, we can just use the same Outreach campaign.”

The campaigns get read and answered.

“There has been great responses for the Outreach emails. They’re engaging. Everybody knows what to expect in the intake,” Swapan said.

Samansa confirmed the same pattern from her side: candidates reply to the welcome email with questions about its contents, which then arrive as tickets and get handled in the normal flow.

Segmentation From Contact List Fields

The same contact list fields that speed up candidate lookup in ticketing decide who receives which version of an Outreach campaign.

“We’ll send emails to students whose registrations are not finalized. There will be a different template for that. The ones that are confirmed, there is a different template for that,” Swapan said. “But that all gets filtered in with the fields from the contact lists.”

Samansa added the detail that makes a mass send read like a message rather than a notice.

“It makes us more humanized, because we can add a logical expression to add their name rather than just a ‘hello.'”

Timing is part of the value too. Everyone in a cohort hears about a registration opening at the same moment, instead of finding out a week apart because someone was working down a list by hand.

Reporting

Department-level volume data, broken down by season, now informs how CPLED plans its year.

“If there is a registration period going on, we would like to track how many emails the registration team got, just so we can know if they have enough capacity to take on more work, or if we need more people,” Swapan said. “Tracking exactly from the registration opening to the closing date how much the volume was has helped us significantly in making informed decisions about hiring and our staffing.”

The reporting also removed a recurring interruption from his own week.

“Right now it’s just integrated in the platform. If a manager is asking for stats, it’s right there. So that has improved my productivity significantly as well.”

Onboarding and Training

CPLED’s rollout was built from four pieces:

• A session with the core team: covering configuration and administration
• A live team-wide training session: delivered by Comm100’s training team
• Two follow-up mini sessions: run internally for individual teams
• The getting started guide: written documentation for self-paced reference

“Onboarding was not that dense,” Swapan said. “The platform itself is really user friendly. It was just the first day that I had to help people out, setting up their views, letting them understand how it works. After the first week it was all settled in. People were using it, using the canned messages, the shortcuts and everything.”

Training ran as a live session with Maria Fielder, Comm100’s Director of Learning, Training & Development.

“That covered basically everything,” Swapan said. “I did two mini sessions with mini teams afterwards, but that was just to answer if they had any questions. Nothing really came up after the session with Maria. They understood how the platform worked, how the permissions were set. Not a tough learning curve.”

Written documentation covered the rest.

“The getting started guide covered everything. We did not have any issues with that. I didn’t have to create anything separately.”

There was scepticism at the start, as there is with any system change.

“Many people on our team were like, do we really need it? We have the traditional email platform,” Swapan said. “But once they started using it, it really made a difference in their day to day work. People are now actually getting to understand why that change was implemented.”

Post-Launch Support

Swapan singled out support after implementation as the thing he had least expected.

“You’re not just left out after implementation in the dark like you have no support. It’s not like that at all,” he said. “In my first week there were people asking me questions and sometimes I don’t know the answer. I used to say, okay, I’ll go ask my Comm100 buddy, because I know they’ll just respond right away on the chat support.”

He also noted how product issues get handled.

“When there is an issue and there needs to be a patch to fix it, they are really keeping me in the loop on what’s happening, when the patch is being released. And just really open to collecting feedback and improving on things as well.”

The Results

“I’ve had a lot of students saying thank you for responding so quickly. I have noticed a huge difference.” – Swapan Goel

• Candidate feedback: unprompted thanks for fast replies, which Swapan attributes to canned responses sitting one shortcut away
• Fifty replies in one action: batch reply collapses the response to a platform-wide issue from an afternoon of individual emails into a single send
• New staff productive in about an hour: Samansa trained two new hires who had never used anything other than Outlook
• Full team settled within a week: beyond first-day help with views, the transition required no formal change management program
• Candidate lookup cut from about five minutes: custom fields on uploaded contact lists put student IDs on the record, removing the spreadsheet cross-reference that a 600-person intake made unworkable
• Staffing decisions backed by volume data: department-level reporting across registration and delivery periods shows where capacity is short before the season starts
• Nothing sitting in the wrong queue: routing on subject lines and contact lists ended the pattern of tickets stalling in departments that could not answer them
• Cohort communication templated and reusable: Outreach campaigns built for one intake are reused for the next with a name change, segmented against contact list fields

The gains also registered at the organizational level.

“One of our strategic objectives was business systems development for this quarter,” Swapan said. “Comm100 really helped us achieve that, because with productivity and just advancing our business systems, this has been a really great addition to our systems within the organization.”

The Bottom Line

CPLED is heading into its largest intake to date. British Columbia joins PREP in September 2026, and enrolment is expected to reach roughly 1,600 candidates across six jurisdictions. The registration period that opens in early August will be the busiest the organization has run, and the ticketing, routing, and reporting now sitting underneath it were put in place with exactly that kind of pressure in mind.

Email remains CPLED’s primary candidate channel, and the team has not yet turned on customer feedback surveys for email ticketing, so CSAT and NPS measurement is still ahead of them. Comm100’s customer success and training teams continue to work with CPLED through monthly check-ins, scheduled around the organization’s registration calendar rather than against it.

Asked what he would tell another institution weighing a ticketing platform, Swapan came back to the transition itself.

“I would for sure recommend Comm100 to other institutions, because especially educational institutions have busy seasons, and you just need a smooth transition from one platform to the other.”