Challenge
Struggling to Serve a Community
Established by an act of the State Legislature in 1920. The agency is responsible for the retirement benefits for most employees of city’s public servants. Founded with over 13,000 members, the agency is responsible for assisting and managing disability or retirement benefits for over 350,000 active, retired civilian employees.
Members regularly making appointments regarding their disability or retirement benefits with one of the 80+ support reps were subject to a labor-intensive scheduling process comprised of manual and electronic methods. The existing scheduling system was difficult to navigate. Finding and scheduling a meeting or a call with the right person with the right knowledge for their needs was a long process. Staff management of important information associated with a member appointment such as powers of attorney was inefficient as well.
The entire system was prone to human error. Spending time on just making a member appointment was becoming an ineffective usage of time and resources as well.
The agency employed a Salesforce consulting partner to help solve the issue. The consultant group established scheduling as one of the workflows affecting the agency’s effectiveness in delivering on its mission as well as directly affecting its efficiency. A scheduling process that catered to both the external customers, the members, and its internal customers, the support staff was recommended. The consultant group evaluated several options and ultimately recommended SUMO Scheduler based on the solution’s ability to meet the long list of requirements. SUMO designed a custom scheduling solution that addressed every concern, improving both the member and staff experiences.
Solution
Evolving the Member Experience
A member starts their journey by logging into a community for authentication. From within the agency’s Salesforce community, they can click on a custom “Schedule Appointment”. A popup offers the member a choice of a disability or retirement appointment and a subtype topic choice like adding a guardian. Both the member and any requested attendees relevant to the member’s appointment purpose are sent an appointment confirmation by email.
Customizations deliver a transparency to members the agencies couldn’t provide with the previous system. Members are now able to go into the community portal to schedule and manage appointments and participants. Members have a similar view as staff members including resource availability.
Results
Delivering on the Mission
Staff also can easily create appointments based on the appointment type and subtype. They are able to schedule appointments based on capacity and volume limits within customized set intervals. Lastly SUMO delivers actionable data. Previous to implementing SUMO, the agency had limited reporting visibility on appointments scheduled, type, and volume. Using the standard reporting functions of the software, the agency now can monitor these important data points and more in a quicker manner.
By streamlining the member journey, the agency is now delivering on its mission and able to be more effective and efficient on delivering information and services to its members. They are also able to positively affect the organization internally with staff that has more time to engage members rather than tedious scheduling tasks.
