From the President’s Desk – One part of my day that I truly enjoy is staying connected with our customer community. Whether it is jumping in and working on a support ticket, attending a user group meeting, or working with a customer on a development project, I enjoy it all.
Engaging with the CAPTAIN user network, staying connected with our customer community, allows me to listen and learn. I learn more about the day to day use of our system. Staying connected with our customer community at the support ticket and design level allows for deeper insight on where we might want to go next with a system feature update. I have always felt that a client data management system must have areas where we can expand features and improve end-user workflow. Our current system is the byproduct of engaging with our customers and learning more about their daily challenges.
It’s Project Development Time!
While recently working with a customer, on a development project for a data feed from CAPTAIN to a funding source system, the customer shared very interesting feedback regarding their data. While listening, I noticed that there were many custom questions in the intake screen for that specific program hierarchy. All the custom fields were not used. That brought us back to the project table to consider some modifications. Some custom fields had been answered while many others had no stored response data. The customer shared that caseworkers only responded to the custom questions based on the funding source the services were being charged to. Translation, please? They were faced with responding to questions they didn’t quite have the answer to yet.
I asked the customer if they could provide an excel spreadsheet of all the questions in the intake for each individual funding source. We came back together to review the spreadsheet and agreed that the presentation of all these questions (specific to a funding source) do not necessarily belong in the intake screen. If these custom questions were only presented to a caseworker when a funding source designation was selected (which would be at the time a benefit is determined) it would be better. In addition, we also added more functionality that ensured users answered these questions before allowing for a service and an invoice to be posted in the system.
The result was a project that removed 2/3 of the custom questions from the intake and relocated them to the screen where the benefit and funding source is selected. This allowed for an intake process that was more intuitive to all caseworkers, improved data entry accuracy, and ensured that funding source specific questions were presented in an organized and efficient manner.
Projects like this improve our system; and the benefit of each project effort is experienced by all our customers. All user experiences in our Case Management module, Head Start module, LIHEAP module, and even our Emergency Services module. That’s why it’s important to stay immersed in our customer community. They unlock the true value of our system every day. Where will the next CAPTAIN feature come from? We will continue to engage our customers and search for the next area to improve our product and our global customer community experience.