Through their helpline, A&AA’s team of health educators deliver guidance and education on managing allergies and minimising the risk of a potentially-fatal anaphylactic reaction. Queries can be complicated, with callers often reaching out multiple times to seek further information and clarification.

Managing these complex cases can be challenging. Implementing Salesforce, the world’s number one CRM, allows each A&AA health educator to easily locate and follow up on the details of previous calls, and instantly link relevant resources, creating a better case-management experience for callers. Despite not having much prior technical experience, the A&AA team have found it easy to use and are already planning new ways to generate even greater utility from the platform.

Problem

One in five Australians live with allergic disease, ranging from chronic conditions such as hay fever, eczema and asthma, to potentially life-threatening anaphylaxis. Approximately 700,000 Australians have a diagnosed food allergy. A&AA provides support and advice to those who live with allergic disease, as well as those who care for them. Their helpline and online resources are particularly important to parents of children and infants who are diagnosed with allergies of some kind.

With so many Australians affected, A&AA also work with and lobby government, the food industry, health care professionals and teachers, to increase support for and awareness of the needs of consumers with allergy across the community.

Solution

A&AA is an extremely small organisation, with 8 staff in total, only one of whom works full-time. Despite their size, the team deliver a huge range of services to their many stakeholders.

Their hotline receives around 1000 contacts a month, primarily from people with allergic disease and their families wanting to speak to a health educator about managing their condition day to day, outside the doctor’s consulting room. Calls and requests are becoming increasingly complex, and often include multiple points of contact with different organisations – for example, reporting a food-safety incident requires multiple interactions with both the person reporting the incident and the relevant authority, and can even result in a legal case or investigation.

Without a proper case management system, it was hard for health educators and support staff to track individuals’ cases and initiate follow-up contact. Clients often had to repeat details of their situation on each call, which could be laborious and frustrating. Health educators, who are highly-trained health professionals, were spending time on inefficient administration and manual-handling of files.

To support their work, A&AA relies on sponsorship, corporate and philanthropic support, donations, and grants from multiple levels of government – stakeholders that are increasingly demanding more detailed Impact Reporting. High-quality data analysis was fast becoming a must-have, but was especially difficult with A&AA’s existing system of “spreadsheets and paper”.

Furthermore, A&AA advocates for change and education. The most effective approach is to share the stories of Australians’ lived experience with allergic disease, so identifying meaningful stories from clients’ complex case records was also becoming increasingly important.

Outcome

“Other vendors either couldn’t have engaged with such a small organisation, or were only offering a ‘DIY’ approach. AlphaSys and Salesforce were able to match the complexity of our requirements within our small organisation. They started from scratch and really listened. Most of our team aren’t particularly technically savvy, but we know our jobs and can describe what we are doing. Our AlphaSys consultant was able to translate that into requirements and personas – we talked about our pain points and processes and we could trust that they’d heard us.”

Karen Wong, Operations Manager, A&AA

In addition to working with the A&AA team to articulate their use cases and priorities, AlphaSys were able to identify several other issues that could be addressed by the Salesforce Service Cloud solution, delivering greater benefits without increasing the cost. The AgilePM approach used by AlphaSys gave the team a clear framework to prioritise high-value functionality and ensure successful delivery.

The entire A&AA team was involved in the implementation process, providing feedback and user-testing. Because the team could see the solution as it was developing, everyone was engaged and onboard. As well as the comprehensive user-guides and training provided by AlphaSys, the A&AA team took full advantage of free Salesforce Trails online training, so they were ready to maximise the value of their solution from day one.

In addition to the case management platform, the solution also addresses a number of other priorities. Health educators can now access a searchable database of all training and resource material (including brochures, fact sheets, webinars, etc). This allows them to more efficiently and proactively plan for reviews, updates and new resources. Although this feature was not originally part of the scope, the iterative AgilePM process allowed the team to identify the potential benefit and implement it. AlphaSys’ smart design will enable future developments that were identified but out of scope for the first phase, putting A&AA in a position to leverage their database as they further embed Salesforce into their processes.

Some features were particularly challenging. Both the AlphaSys and A&AA teams had to work hard to create a solution, demonstrating gritty determination to deliver an outcome that the A&AA team now report “loving” to use.