People Association CRM

Problem

The People's Association (PA) is assisting a lot of residents with their financial difficulties through the use of multiple funds. Currently, the routing and approval seeking are manually done by the community officer (CO) at different community centers. The problems with the current approach are:

An arduous administrative process carried out by our COs using physical forms and manually carrying forms around for signatures. Right now it usually takes 3 weeks for each approval, which induces a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety for the family who might be living paycheck to paycheck
Lack of consistency between different community centers about this process
Data are not being digitally collected for better policy-making

Solution

We use our Plumber product (for workflow automation) in combination with Zendesk (for remote communication and approval seeking) and M365 (for data storage and possible analysis)

In our design, we have 2 Plumber workflows:

Application creation workflow:
- Starts with a FormSG that residents and COs and raise a case
- The workflow, upon receiving the submission, will create a Zendesk ticket and assign it to the CO
- The workflow will also persist the case inside a shared M365 excel sheet for tracking
Approval workflow:
- CO will gather any extra information from resident (if needed) to add to the case before forwarding to the relevant parties (also on Zendesk) for explicit approval
- Upon approval / rejection on Zendesk, the Plumber workflow will update the case status to the tracking M365 sheet
- The M365 sheet can be used to chart data and draw insights to make better policies

Impact and Potential Growth

With our automation, approval time can be cut down to within the one day.

Team Members

Yuanruo
Malcolm
Stanley