Why you're still stuck with hotline and case management you don't like

Ask a compliance leader what they'd change about their hotline and case management vendor and the list comes fast. Reports exported to Excel and rebuilt by hand every quarter. A support ticket every time you need to change a field. A separate line item for every translation.

Then ask if they're switching. Usually the answer is "not yet."

We hear why on almost every call. They've been with the vendor for years, the whole program is built around it, and the last migration they lived through was painful. So the contract renews again.

Why switching feels so costly

Your case history is built into it. Years of cases live in the old system, along with your categories, custom fields and investigator workflows. Pulling all that apart sounds like a project nobody asked for, so the question becomes "why move?"

Some teams already split it up. Larger organizations often keep the hotline for intake and send cases into a company-wide ticketing tool like ServiceNow or Zendesk. For them, swapping the hotline is the easy part. The case history, wherever it lives, is what makes switching feel expensive.

Getting your data out has been painful. Teams who've switched before remember it. Case history was hard to get out of the old vendor, and the migration came back quoted as a services project. Once you've lived through that, you don't sign up for it lightly.

The contract timing works against you. Hotline and case management contracts often run three years, sometimes five. The renewal terms surface late and the cancellation window is easy to miss. Switching mid-term looks like paying two vendors at once.

Add it up and renewal looks like the safe choice. You keep a tool your team works around every day, because leaving looks harder than staying.

That math made sense when moving cases meant months of manual work. It doesn't anymore.

What AI changes

The hardest part of switching has always been the case management: years of records, each in its own format, that someone had to map and retype. AI is good at exactly that work: reading messy records and putting them into a consistent structure. Here's how that looks in Ethena's Ethics Hotline & Case Management with AI case import.

Start from your cases table: Open the cases table in Ethena and upload case files from your old system. Unlimited custom fields mean all of your legacy data has a home.
Any format works: Hotline vendor exports, ticketing tool exports, spreadsheets, emails and screenshots all go in, even cases that never made it into a system. AI reads each one and turns it into a structured case.
History sits next to new cases: Imported cases live in the same searchable place as everything new, so your trend lines pick up right where they left off.
Get up to speed fast: Each case gets an AI summary with a timeline of key moments, so investigators can pick up an old case without digging.

What used to take weeks of mapping and cleanup becomes an upload and a review, with every imported case there for your team to check. There's no charge for case import, so your trend analysis works on day one. Prefer a hands-on approach? Our team handles the migration with you, including getting your cases out of the old system.

The contract doesn't have to wait either. If you're locked into a contract you've outgrown, we'll buy it out. You don't pay us a dollar until your existing deal ends, and you can start implementing the day you sign. Terms and conditions apply.

And once you're moved. Every case gets an AI summary that stays current as the case evolves, and analytics read across your whole program, so the board report stops being a quarterly rebuild in Excel. Your admins change fields, branding and translations themselves, at no extra cost. And you get a dedicated CSM and an implementation lead, with answers in hours.

Before your next renewal

If your hotline or case management contract renews in the next year, run the math again with today's tools. Our hotline contract prompt pulls the dates and terms out of your contract for you, and the renewal countdown covers the full timeline. Then ask:

When does it auto-renew? Find the notice window now, before it passes on its own.
What would migration cost us? Ask your current vendor what they charge to export your case history. If the quote is steep, don't let it make the decision for you. Talk to us first, and we'll help you get your history out.
Can we get our data out cleanly? Request a sample export of a few closed cases.
What are we paying in add-ons? Count the features you pay extra for that come standard elsewhere.
How much does our team work around the tool? Count the side spreadsheets and the reports rebuilt by hand.

If the answers make you wince, you're not stuck. Your case history can come with you.

Want to see your own case files come through? Let's talk.