WorkLife Partnership (WLP) engages with businesses to support the needs of front-line employees (who have been especially stretched during the COVID-19 pandemic). WLP’s employee assistance program uses specialized Navigators—proxy case managers—to assist employees with personal and financial challenges, yielding higher employee engagement and lower turnover costs for a participating business.
Resource Navigators offer high-touch help to their workforce clients with challenges from childcare to housing and healthcare to transportation. WLP’s one-on-one approach allows Resource Navigators to help resolve client issues through a combination of direct and community resources. Individual client interactions are tracked so that each employer can receive aggregate feedback to better understand the real challenges their employees face. Through this work, WorkLife invites employers to engage in the systemic changes that are needed to truly support front-line/essential workers.
Challenges
WLP reached out to Bigger Boat after running up against the limitations of their two legacy systems—one for employer engagement/sales and one for case management (eLogic). We helped address two major areas:
- Complex Resource Navigator process. Their existing case management system was inflexible, inefficient, and cumbersome for reporting. Navigator efficiency and reporting issues made their setup unsustainable.
- Disconnected processes and data. WLP’s sales and engagement management data lived in one system with limited visibility for programmatic staff. The case management data lived in a separate system with no access for the sales team. These disconnected data sets created serious challenges as both teams could only see their part of the business. For example, the sales team was unable to access updated metrics about client outcomes and trends, which were essential to successfully selling the program to prospective clients.
Approach
As we do with all of our clients, we started with a discovery phase to gain a shared understanding of the challenges and goals. After discovery, we focused our implementation in the following areas for this project:
- Resource Navigator core functionality
- Sales and Engagement Management core functionality
Resource Navigator core functionality
Each of WLP’s programs works in the same way: a Navigator delivers services to clients—both directly themselves and externally through referrals. This programmatic model lent itself well to the new Program Management Module (PMM) product and architecture from Salesforce.
Using the pre-built foundation of Salesforce’s PMM, WLP could redirect project resources that would have been used on configuring their system’s basic architecture. They were able to go further (with Bigger Boat’s support) in building tailored solutions to program and service delivery processes.
One customization highlight relates to service delivery tracking in Salesforce. Out of the box, PMM’s Bulk Service Delivery feature requires a user to select the appropriate client and program engagement each time a service is delivered. This means that tracking when a Navigator provides multiple services to a single client requires repetitive work. Since Navigators often deliver multiple services to a single client during one interaction, this was an inefficient workflow. To streamline the process, Bigger Boat built a custom Flow that filters services from a large list based on type and category, offers them to the user for selection, and then creates Service Delivery records for a single client in bulk. This build offered a quicker data entry workflow for users, while still tracking key metrics for leadership.
Sales and Engagement Management core functionality
We used standard Salesforce features when adding sales and engagement management to WLP’s new Salesforce system. Sales reps now track interactions with potential employers and work opportunities through their sales pipeline. They can also provide data for forecasting to leadership and WorkLife’s Board.
With both sales and Navigator workflows happening in Salesforce, WorkLife’s customer engagement staff—the link between those teams—can now keep an eye on progress without juggling multiple systems. Up-to-date information about outreach activities, status of sales renewals, and programmatic delivery metrics are all easy to find and help them manage their 360-degree relationship with participating employers.
Summary
COVID-19 has provided numerous challenges for front-line workers and their employers. With their new Salesforce system built around their workflow, WorkLife Partnership is better able to address employee needs.
The Navigators have an efficient workflow that enables them to spend their time serving clients, rather than entering data. The sales team now has a holistic view of client impact to help inform their stewardship of renewals and new opportunities. And the engagement management team is no longer swimming in multiple systems, trying to connect the data.
For this project, we leveraged off-the-shelf solutions like Salesforce’s Program Management Module and coached their admin to own their new Salesforce system. WorkLife is ready for whatever the post-COVID world throws at them.