Just the Facts
REVISION designed and implemented a solution for this public agency to meet the needs of a scalable case management system allied to a brochure website and interactive portal, enabling this newly formed organization to be fully operational in 3 months. The resulting solution enabled the client’s staff to track caseloads for appointed personnel, who have responsibility for overseeing legal, medical and housing decisions for each Ward under their care. The scope of work also included visualization of recording application intake, intake association to users, assessment data capture, artifact collection, decision capture, automated email distribution and reporting to meet legislative Statutes.
REVISION provides complete end to end support for this public agency, eliminating their need for in-house technology staff and support.
The Challenge
Local and state governments, along with government organizations, are now looking for ways to adapt the latest technological advancements within the office to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction. Technological modernization and case management enablement take high priority in allowing leaders to expand the capabilities of their business.
Leaders find themselves constrained by the current capabilities of the tools and infrastructure put in place years ago. Many of the newly appointed directors carry a profound experience in the processes enabled in an aged technology. Consequently, these professionals need a digital transformation to bring their vision of improvement to life through a modern technology framework.
REVISION’s purpose and mission lie in crafting the appropriate solutions to tackle the digital transition process. As a digital transformation consultant with extensive experience implementing value-add programs in similar enterprises, REVISION has identified proven and concrete steps to address these needs.
Some organizations are known as green-field projects, which refers to software development services created from scratch to appropriately and most efficiently adapt to new environments. This applies to organizations without existing software or ERP system to fit the administrative workflow required. Usually, the customers have no dedicated technology support organization. Although a clean slate represents endless opportunities for advancement, we recognized that it is challenging to propose and implement a solution without clearly identifying the customer service process(es) within an organization.
The Approach
To overcome this challenge, the key is to provide a sustainable, maintainable, and scalable solution combined with the proper discovery framework in coordination with our experienced SMEs. Accordingly, our Business Applications team spends the first few months designing and implementing a solution bearing sensitivity to future flexibility, licensing costs, and usability by the public.
Here is a step by step on how we overcame this challenge.
1. Define your customer service processes
The underlying message is clear: Any tool you implement will lack user adoption if you don’t know your processes or are unclear. Defining your processes first allows your organization to take an “outward-in” approach – as in thinking about and fully understanding the experience you will provide when servicing your customers to meet their needs and not forcing your customers into a box defined inside an organization. These processes should be represented across your organization holistically, where possible, and not segmented by a line of business, product, or other natural silos. Your process definition should also include the service channel (e.g., Web, Email, Phone, Social, etc.) of origination and management, the critical steps to resolution, and any escalation business rules. This allows your organization to serve any client, regardless of circumstance and preference consistently.
2. Include support of omni channel case management
Customers today expect to engage with your organization through any channel they wish at any time, requiring organizations and their agents to support and manage multiple channels. Leveraging tools such as the Case Feed or newly-announced Intelligent Routing and Presence capabilities within your Service Cloud1 implementation will help your organization achieve this in a single location. The Case Feed allows users to view all activities related to an incident in a single view with indicators of the type of engagement activity that occurred and enables users to switch between multiple channels to engage with a customer on a single screen. The intelligent routing functionality allows you to auto-assign cases to your agents based on an agent’s listed expertise, the priority of cases, or agent’s presence/ability, reducing the amount of “non-value add time” (or time where cases are sitting idle in a queue).
3. Achieve automation through Entitlements Milestones and Milestone Actions
Once your organization defines its processes, they become much more effective when automated within the tool. The Service Cloud1 platform allows organizations to automate their service processes using Entitlements, including the Milestones and Milestone Actions functionality. Milestones allow organizations to designate certain stages (or milestones) within a service process and have a case proceed through the defined milestones. Specific automated tasks can occur during the milestones using the Milestone Actions – similar to Salesforce.com’s workflow engine but tied explicitly into a Milestone for an Entitlement. Leveraging this functionality will help your agents work the case through the service process without manually facilitating and driving the case to completion, providing a better experience for the agent.
4. Leverage the Service Console to boost agent productivity
The Service Cloud1 platform includes the Service Console, a single unified desktop with a modern user experience to increase agent productivity. Combined with the Case Feed, the Service Console allows an agent to view all relevant information needed to resolve a customer’s case. Throw in Chatter Publisher Actions, and you have an efficient toolkit at your agents’ disposal.
5. Build a real-time feedback loop for your agents through key metrics and dashboards
As part of your service process definition, it is essential to identify your organization’s key metrics to measure your performance and success in servicing your customers. Take advantage of the native Reporting and Dashboards functionality offered through Salesforce.com – along with the recently announced WAVE Analytics Cloud – to track and provide key leading and lagging indicators to help your organization understand and make critical business decisions, including First Time Response, Customer Communication Cadence (Activity by Channel), Same Day Resolution, and Average Queue Times. These metrics should be agent-specific and management-specific to help users understand their performance, ultimately holding agents accountable.
The Outcomes
REVISION can execute this process entirely in-house, where we control the provisioning. Early in the project, we start the estimation process by creating journey maps and providing guiding support to safeguard the project’s vision. We gather high-level requirements to offer insights and define the functional specifications without making platform selections. We believe in remaining technologically agnostic, preferring to maintain agility and flexibility until the selections are founded in a sense and grounded by budget. The most important practice we adhere to is the rapid validation of features. User interface dominated to ensure user-driven validation. We often release short feedback loops of new features.
We keep things simple: A suitably hardened WordPress™ public access portal, Salesforce® case processing, encrypted cloud data, Enterprise Services Delivery, and our REVSync data synchronization providing replication, data validation, redundancy, and backup for resiliency. Keeping the stack as simple as possible keeps support and maintenance open and reduces training needs in onboarding for the customer. From a technological perspective, the simple stack forced us to be more creative at times, but we could accompany every requirement. We noticed that you established common patterns a lot faster with a smaller toolset, which sped up our work.
We leveraged a case management process with Salesforce implementation and a flexible portal platform that the client could integrate seamlessly. Likewise, the business case justified the development of an elegant data synchronization feature, now a product. After having supported various events since launch, including malformed email addresses, increased needs of business data sharing, and increased features, we can look back on a fully-featured, fully functional product.
