We start with a dream, then we work backwards.

We’re a solutions focused company, it’s why we exist. It doesn’t matter who we’re partnering with, what industry we’re working in, or what platform we’re recommending — each project is viewed on its merit.

This agnostic outlook works for us because we don’t perceive our world through a black and white lens. Remember that iconic moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy emerges from her monochrome Kansas homestead into a world of vivid kaleidoscope colours? We exist in a technicolour world too. Every challenge we take on has multiple angles to approach it from, and our retinas are wide open to that full spectrum of colour and light.

Case in point: My Plan Manager (MPM). We’re really proud of this job for a number of reasons. At a human level, it was a privilege to be partnering with a business who was working to improve social outcomes for thousands of people living with physical and intellectual disability in Australia.

At a project level, it was right in our wheelhouse. This was a complex challenge with multiple moving parts, stakeholders and potential solutions.

So, how did it go?

The state of play

At full Scheme Roll-out, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) will provide more than $22 billion in funding a year to an estimated 500,000 Australians who have permanent and significant disability. And there are around 4.3 million people in Australia who live with a disability, so the solution to the challenge had to firstly work at scale for multiple stakeholders.

For many people, it will be the first time they receive the disability support they need, and it’s delivered to them via a dedicated plan manager. In short, plan managers are sought out by NDIS participants to help with managing the funding of their plan. This is where MPM shines as an operation built on relationships, but with such growing participant numbers, finding efficiencies were at the top of the wishlist.

The challenges

The scale of the challenge wasn’t lost on My Plan Manager CEO, Jane Kittel, who saw us as a natural fit to partner up in finding a strategic solution.

My Plan Manager has been working with Cloudwerx since March 2020 and our relationship throughout that time has developed into an important strategic partnership.

We always welcome partnerships with customers who understand the value of strategy and collaboration, and they were traits that MPM embodied throughout this process.

We tackled the challenges from three separate, yet equally important points of view:
1. Improving client onboarding + experience
2. Improving provider service, and;
3. Improving client service.

From the client onboarding and experience perspective, challenges like inconsistent user experiences and complex and time-consuming processes were our low hanging fruit.

From the provider service perspective, challenges around administration access and limiting human intervention were at the top of the to-do list.

And from the client service perspective, maintaining client support and retention in a period of rapid growth was a reality that had to be met.

The solutions

As is the case with all of our partnerships, we embed ourselves in teams to cover every aspect of a challenge.

It’s easy to come in with a cookie cutter approach, but for MPM being so large, complex, and sensitive, solutions don’t often manifest until you really put in the time and energy to understand it from every angle.

It’s always a confidence-booster when you’re on the same page in a partnership. And knowing that we had a like-minded partner in MPM gave us the freedom to push the boundaries with our strategic thinking. Jane Kittel shared this sentiment too.

Cloudwerx are an integral part of our team, providing our everyday Salesforce Managed Services support as well as partnering with us to transform key business processes in Salesforce, ensuring we maximise Salesforce functionality to drive efficiency and importantly, better client outcomes, she said.

As a result, we discovered that developing an efficient, mobile responsive experience for clients would not only improve conversion and data capture rates, but it would also save the equivalent of 5,750 hours per year.

Further, we found that creating a mobile responsive Provider Community hosted on Salesforce would increase visibility and reduce processing and man hours for each enquiry. This intervention has saved up to 5 minutes of processing time for invoices. Time is money, right?

And we were also confident that using robotic process automation in client services could still be personalised if we created customised solutions based around locality, previous interactions, and smaller teams.

The results

We believe that an open mind will always uncover the best insights — especially when the search area takes into account the lay of the land. For My Plan Manager, they were founded on principles of kindness, honesty and inclusivity.

This filter was a non-negotiable as we went searching for solutions. Anything we discovered had to be tied directly back to MPM’s principles. We couldn’t create a custom solution if it didn’t make clients feel included, and similarly, there was no point saving time or FTEs if the interactions weren’t kind and honest.

The meaning

It doesn’t really matter what the industry, service, or type of client we work with is, at the end of it all, there will almost always need to be a technicolour solution to a complex problem.

The new models and journeys we helped create for MPM started with unpicking a challenge before we knew what the outcome was going to be — in this case, it worked with Salesforce and UiPath. But as we do with all of our projects, we only arrived here because we’re not willing to view our world through a monochrome lens.

Of course, Dorothy wakes up in a black and white Kansas in the end, but we’re pretty content to stay put just over the rainbow.