Full Life provides services to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Their services include therapeutic support, assistive technology and equipment implementation, and home modification facilitation. As they scaled, they found that they were capped at the number of clients they could book, which resulted in a large backlog of appointments that needed to be booked and a longer waitlist for clients. More tasks were repetitive and difficult to stay on top of as the client base grew, especially in the accounting sector.
The primary objective of our engagement was to create a user-friendly system for staff to manage leads, clients, appointments, and contractual agreements, and to decrease the amount of time staff spent on processing bookings, finance and other administrative tasks. To achieve this, Kipanga first needed to understand all of the pain points in their current systems, before designing and developing the new platform and automations.
Our first task was utilising Origami, business automation tools and custom development to create a CRM that offered a customised view of their clients and future leads, as alternative CRM systems on the market were limited to static fields that could not be customised to include data relevant to Full Life’s clientele and industry. Appointment information, funding information and contractual agreements were associated with each client, along with information for Full Life to provide their service.
We then assisted the accounting department by syncing all budgetary information into their new CRM to gain enhanced visuals on where they have the capacity to operate. Furthermore, the process of invoicing a client was fully automated to drastically reduce the time and effort required to handle each invoice, which enabled to team to accomplish much more and reduced human error.
Our next task was to optimise and reduce the time required to process a new appointment. This improvement enabled Full Life to schedule appointments more frequently, allowing them to provide services across Australia through in-person and online appointments with 30+ staff members.
This was done by fully automating appointment invitations, with a set process each client follows when booked. To assist staff, booked appointments create all of the required calendar events, along with meeting invitations for the attending parties and automated reminder emails to all contacts that need to be notified of the appointment itself.
Along with instances of custom development, such as a tailored form that is sent to clients with advanced conditionals and pre-population of their specific information, as well as custom automations to reduce manual efforts of staff in their ongoing operations, Kipanga has now set up hundreds of different implementations for Full Life to assist them in facilitating the best possible service without the headache of tedious tasks, slow systems and overwhelming administrative work.
As our engagement went on, we continued to find ways we could automate their business processes, such that now they have an autonomous system that runs with minimal human labour and requires human approval only on certain decisions. As the platforms we use are scalable, the system we implemented allows us to extend new workflows to other areas of the business, such as HR tasks and process management tasks, which will be developed in the coming months.
We encountered challenges during our engagement, with some notable ones being changes in business requirements, changes in technologies, and issues with platforms.
As is the nature of any business, requirements change. We felt this impact a few times, as the need for the system shifted in a different direction than initially planned. We dealt with this each time it happened by closely working with the product owner and project manager to plan our next steps accordingly. Whether this was developing new modules in their system, or making changes to existing ones, we were always able to adapt in a short timeframe and provide quality service in a very timely manner.
Furthermore, we encountered a few changes in the systems they were using, which required us to modify our implementations to facilitate the new requirements. This could have been a small change in the data we were processing or a complete deprecation of a system they previously depended on; we continued to offer our expertise in both the development of the new requirements and the migration of the previous implementation to the new one.
Finally, during our engagement, we encountered unexpected issues with the platforms Full Life depended on. Whether this was an unexpected configuration error with Microsoft or a system downtime with an automation platform, Kipanga maintained close contact with support and facilitated the best service possible in the circumstances with the main goal of getting systems operational again. With many of these cases occurring well past business hours, we ensured that the system was back up and running as soon as possible, no data was lost, and any unprocessed tasks were re-run manually.
Challenges occur when designing, developing and maintaining a system, however, each time one arose, we managed to provide quality service that offered quick resolutions and remediations.
The automations we developed for the accounting team save multiple work days at the end of each month by processing hundreds of invoices. As the number of monthly invoices grows, the number of days saved increases accordingly.
Furthermore, the booking process we defined and automated not only simplified the existing procedures but also saved an immense amount of time per booking. We simultaneously saved costs on manual staff hours whilst also removing the bottleneck that prevented them from scaling past a certain amount of bookings per month. The time that it takes to schedule a client’s first appointment has been reduced by hours, with data retention increasing such that no information is lost during the process. Their monthly bookings have increased 4 times the number of appointments they could previously schedule, with thousands of automated emails sent monthly, Full Life is not only able to provide their service at a larger scale, but they are also saving so much time and money per appointment.
Finally, the centralisation of all data on one system allows the staff to work in a much more efficient manner as well, which indirectly saves both time and cost for the business, and improves the services they offer to deaf clients. There are many automated synchronisations between the other existing systems as well which provide a seamless experience for the staff, such that all information they are viewing is updated and live from all other areas of the business.
The system we have developed for Full Life has allowed them to scale past their previous capacity, with key metrics being:
Booking Process Automations and Optimisations:
Accounting Automations:
CRM Development:
The centralisation of their system (with the many automations that provide a smooth experience for their staff) has provided Full Life with the ability to provide their care for more people, with a much smoother experience on both ends of their engagement.
Online Solutions
E-commerce
Business Automation
Outsourcing
AWS
IT Management
Business Growth Management
Online Solutions
E-commerce
Business Automation
Outsourcing
AWS
IT Management
Business Growth Management
