The Situation
Spectrum Care is an independent charitable trust that provides services for children, young people and adults with disabilities and their families. Spectrum’s core focus is to offer people-centred services and options that focus on individual needs, working with its service users to identify their personal goals and aspirations and help them achieve their immediate and lifelong objectives.
As innovators and leaders in the disability sector, Spectrum Care needed a “world class” customer relationship management (CRM) system that would give them an all-important centralised view of the people they serve over 90 sites in the Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions. Spectrum Care needed a user-friendly system that would underpin and bring together every area of the business, increasing the value, visibility and usability of information, streamlining business processes and enabling enhanced and more timely and meaningful reporting.
Having previously engaged Intergen to implement its Microsoft Dynamics NAV financial system and SharePoint intranet, Spectrum Care again looked to this long-standing relationship (and well-established commitment to Microsoft technologies) for a CRM system that would support its drive for excellence.
The Pain
The previous system had originated within the finance team and didn’t encompass the goals and needs of the whole organisation. Staff lacked trust in the system. It wasn’t user friendly or reliable and, as a consequence, information was stored in many different places: within Excel, Access, on paper, in the finance team’s database and in people’s heads. It presented an incomplete view of the organisation and its service users, thus discouraging everyday use and suffering poor adoption.
The Vision
Spectrum Care’s vision for its CRM solution was clear and in line with its overall business objectives: “In essence, it’s all about getting a central view of the service user and using technology to work towards what in the industry we call Outcomes.”
Justin Walsh, Spectrum Care’s Communications and Relationships Manager says, “The better we can be as an organisation, the more we’ll be able to achieve our vision of ‘People with disabilities living great lives’, and the introduction of a high-quality CRM system has allowed us to take a significant step forward in modelling our objective of ‘excellence’. It’s also made a significant contribution to achieving our vision of providing bespoke, person-centred outcomes for the people we serve.”
Spectrum Care’s IT Manager, Aaron Overington, explains, “By containing our organisational knowledge in one central, searchable repository, we can gain greater insights into our people’s needs and, as a result, we’re able to better serve them by focusing our efforts where they can have the greatest impact.”
The Gain
In November 2010, the New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation presented Spectrum Care with a prestigious silver award, the first organisation in the health and disability sector and one of only 14 organisations nationally to receive an accolade at this level. This success is, in part, attributable to the attention it has paid to its core IT systems.
Justin says, “In order to receive such an award, entrants must meet a wide variety of exacting criteria relating to areas such as customer focus, leadership and process management and measurement, analysis and knowledge management. In this regard, the introduction of a robust, scalable and well-supported CRM system was of pivotal importance.”
“Kudos to Intergen for taking the time to understand our business, seeing the big picture and then designing a solution that really matched what we were aiming to do,” Aaron adds.
The gains have been numerous — faster reporting times, greater visibility of all interactions and ease of use, as well as greater person-centredness, and flexibility.
“Everything’s in one place now,” Aaron says. “It’s great to be able to pull all the data sources together into ‘one version of truth’.”
As leaders in the disability sector, the CRM system has already received much attention and praise, playing an instrumental part in Spectrum Care’s journey to becoming ‘truly world-class’.
The Business Case
As a people-centric organisation, Spectrum Care needed a better and more holistic view of their service users in order to offer them ‘world-class’ service and help them achieve their goals. A robust CRM system was seen as the way to do this.
The Business Value
- A system that facilitates an award-winning service
- Gains in sector leadership
- Greater ‘person-centredness’
- Competitive advantage
- Ease of use and good adoption
- Faster, more complete reporting
- Easier access to online information
- Flexibility to modify and add to the system quickly and easily