St. Louis Arc
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Client: St. Louis Arc
Case Study: Business Process Automation and Relationship Management with salesforce.com
The Client
The St. Louis Arc provides a lifetime of high-quality
individualized services, support and advocacy to more than 3,000
developmentally disabled adults and children, and their families, in
the St. Louis metropolitan area. As an affiliated chapter of the Arc of
the United States, the St. Louis Arc is integrated in the world's
largest community based organization of and for people with
intellectual and developmental disabilities. One of the organization’s
key programs, Respite Services, empowers families to select and obtain
the additional care giver support they need to care for their loved
ones at home. Families not only determine when they need care, but who
provides it, having the power to designate a person of their choosing
as the care provider, or someone from St. Louis Arc’s care provider
database. Respite Services reimburses families at standard rates for
the short-term relief services they receive. While Respite Services
touches the largest number of beneficiaries, the St. Louis Arc has
several other programs including community integration services,
residential services, cultural events, sports programs, social
activities and employment services.
The Challenge
With
the number of clients increasing every year, and with a highly
complicated state voucher reporting and verification system required
for each client, St. Louis Arc’s Respite Services spent an enormous
amount of time on manual data entry and review. This resulted in high
overhead costs and poor data quality. Lacking a central database and a
simple method for adding and updating client records across the
organization, each program had its own client database. This approach
created extensive duplication of effort and prevented staff from
understanding each beneficiary's full involvement. Even worse, the
organization's communications capacity was severely
limited by existing tools - it took staff nearly two days to create a
beneficiary email distribution list. The organization needed a more
efficient case management system that allowed staff to track the
history of someone's relationship with the agency; it needed an easier
way to facilitate two-way communication with the people they serve; and
it needed a solution that could eventually integrate all of their
programs into one database.
The Solution
ifPeople
recognized that the St. Louis Arc needed to migrate from a
program-centric process of tracking relationships to a people-centric
one. As staff already worked at full-capacity, the new system needed to
be easy to adopt and able to facilitate people with their jobs. With a
stable of long-time employees, St. Louis Arc also required a system
that would capture the institutional knowledge only housed in staff's
memory. In order to ensure organizational fit, ifPeople assembled a
group of stakeholders who provided feedback throughout the process,
guiding process improvements as well as technical implementation.
ifPeople developed an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
system for Respite Services that can easily expand to accommodate St.
Louis Arc’s other programs over time using the Salesforce.com platform.
Through the new CRM system, ifPeople made it possible for St. Louis Arc
to easily enter and track client information and quickly create
targeted email lists.
The Outcome
The new capabilities
developed and implemented by ifPeople help St. Louis Arc to better
satisfy all of its internal and external reporting requirements, save
staff time, and increase capacity for communications. Involving the
staff throughout the process has lead to a high level of satisfaction
with the solution and an eagerness to use and extend the new
technology. By dramatically increasing data accuracy and
cost-effectiveness and significantly decreasing duplication of efforts,
the organization can devote more time to audit reporting and better
track usage trends and client needs. This shifts staff effort from data
entry to improving the service. By moving to a "customer-centric"
model, St. Louis Arc now manages critical relationships more
effectively, having the ability to control and track outreach, file
referral information, and report on the lifetime of care provided.
