Embedded Files
As the experience design lead within a digital transformation team, I spearheaded research efforts to understand how the existing CRM system built using Microsoft Dynamics could be leveraged to address the pain points faced by clients and staff. My team and I then used these insights to design a client portal focused on reducing service waitlists and improving access to healthcare for families.
Research
I undertook the planning and execution of 30 interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities and challenges faced by Surrey Place clients and staff. Through these interviews, we identified critical pain points and areas for improvement, ultimately paving the way for a more streamlined and effective system that better met the needs of our users.
This research allowed me to build a comprehensive persona of our core user group, as well as map out their journey from discovery to service registration.
Key findings
Internal processes at Surrey Place posed challenges in providing families with the appropriate services at the right time to due to extended gaps between the initial client assessment and the availability of service spots.
Staff needed a way to share documents with clients, and be able to see what documents were already shared by staff and clients
Caregivers found the existing service management process challenging as it required taking phone calls and attending in-person meetings during the day.
Staff across the organization couldn't keep track of the communication between individual staff and clients.
Product Strategy
Leveraging the research findings, I was able to pinpoint key product opportunities that would reduce wait times and improve the staff and client experience.
Service management: enable clients to sign up, pay for, and manage their services online.
Waitlist automation: drawing on the research, I successfully championed implementing an automated waitlist management strategy aimed at reducing the time users spent on waitlists.
Communication: provide clients with the means to communicate with clinicians and intake staff that could be access by all staff.
File management: enable clients and staff to easily share files and seamlessly add these files to the clients record to provide universal access these documents.
Solution
Information Architecture
Based on the research, and early stage user stories that were developed with subject matter experts and the review the existing CRM system processes, I designed of sitemap to visualize the structure of the portal.
Service Management
The new services portal feature was built using the new waitlist management strategy. Because all clients started off on a waitlist it was important for users to understand the status of their services and also the make it easy for users to nd had to wait for the service spot to open up.
Waitlist Automation
One of the key areas of improvement that our research identified was the need to modernize the existing service management process which at the time relied on in-person and phone calls this resulted in long gaps between the communication and was causing a considerable backlog of clients waiting for services and not receiving them on time, because their needs changed drastically between the time of consultation and service availability.
Solution
Clients on the waitlist were offered spots for five business days through the portal. Within this time period users have the ability accept or decline the service, declined spots are then automatically offered to the next client on the waitlist. Creating a continuous rotation of service offerings to everyone on the list.
Communication
After exploring how clinicians communicated with clients I learned that individual client maybe serviced by more than one clinician when receiving a single service and that these clinicians may change throughout the lifespan of the service. This meant that the traditional in-box or messaging function wouldn't work as this would mean that each client would have a long list of clinicians in their address book not always aware of who they need to contact.
To assess our options I collaborated with the CRM consultants to understand how we could leverage Microsoft Dynamics inbox functionality to collect all communication with between the client and the clinicians and add it to the clients record.
Solution
In order to simplify how clients interacted with the organization I grouped all of the communication for each individual service into a service specific message inbox that had clinicians assigned to the service. This removed the need for the client to know who to message, while allowing the CRM to attach these messages to the client record and alert clinicians that there's a new message that they could answer either through the CRM or by replying to an email.
Conclusion
Undertaking this project provided me with an invaluable experience of delving into the intricate workings of enterprise software. It also exposed me to the challenges of operating within a constrained system, which may not always be conducive to offering the most optimal solution for the user. Through this, I learned the importance of approaching problem-solving by considering system limitations at the time of conceptualization and how to work within them.
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