Episode 039: OnBase Case Manager for World-Class Customer Support

Thanks for joining us. My name is Steve Glisky, your host. Today, we’re going to talk about how our Customer Care department at ImageSoft, how they use OnBase to dramatically improve the support experience our customers receive. And with me are a few key people to share their wisdom on how this is accomplished. We have Patrick, a senior technical support engineer from Customer Care. Say hello there, Patrick.

So the question was: Do we revamp CRM? Do we look at some other options? And one of those was OnBase’s WorkView solution. In the time since the last time we had looked at OnBase’s WorkView, it had completely expanded what it was able to do. Hyland had made huge leaps in functionality and it definitely met all of our needs. So that’s why we chose to do that because we’re OnBase professionals. We already work in OnBase and so just continuing to be in there, rather than spending all this time learning another solution or learning more about CRM, why not just take the knowledge we know and develop WorkView. So that was really the reasons of why we left and why we picked WorkView as the correct place for our new home.

So with that, for us with case management, we don’t need a physical piece of paper associated to that. We just need to know that this is the issue with, as supposed, a description of what’s going on and a place for us to track time. So it uses attributes where those are the places you store values, so a first name would be an attribute. So, for me, my first name is Patrick on my employee record. Above that, you have classes or the entire record. An employee is a record in the system and then above that, you have the application. For us, that is Customer Care. In Customer Care, we have employees, we have customers, we have cases. So it all works together to build virtual information for you.

You can, of course, go way beyond that and start developing scripts and things like that to do advanced things. But to get in there and to have just some information displaying on the screen to your users is a couple minutes. It doesn’t take very long to set up an application with a class and some attributes on it and then to get that data displaying is also very simple.

So if I go and have an hour long meeting of doing investigation with a customer, I will track that time against my case. What’s really nice about WorkView is you have the ability to have filters that display related objects and related data, so you can just go into this one case and see that myself have added 15 tasks to it. And I can see a brief description of what that task is all in a very nice view for the end user. Somebody else may think, goes, “What was Patrick doing on this?” He can see that information.

So that’s the nice thing about WorkView’s database design is that you have these relationships. In there, as well, we also provide features to help solve cases faster, knowledge-based articles and other pieces of information that we have that might be related to the case. The customer has reported a Workflow problem, so here are useful resources to help with Workflow. Here are knowledge experts in Workflow throughout the company and then the list of employees. So it’s, here are other contacts for the company in case you need that.

It’s just we start listing data and bringing as much information as we can so that, with as few as clicks possible, people can get to that information and start working on issues faster. But at the crux of it all, it’s you open up an issue, you track your time and then you close your case, so it’s a pretty simple system on the surface with just a lot of bells and whistles so that we can do our job better.

So it was a real joy to work on, that the priority was delivering the best product, not just under this time crunch of it’s got to be done by the end of the month. So because we had that flexibility, because we had CRM, which was doing just a fine job of keeping us going, we were really able to develop a custom solution that was best for us. Yeah.

But if you were to compress it down where it’s just one person working full-time to it, it’s probably a month and a half, six, eight weeks to build that. Then, what was nice is, as we moved into the other departments, in moving into Customer Care, we were able to reuse a lot of that. So we were able to reduce that time to about three, four weeks, where we were actually building and making the modifications because that’s shared information and design between the different departments.

So all in all, between getting that minimum, viable product and then building that first couple ways of expansion, because we’re still continuing to develop on it today as new ideas. But really getting from NBP and diversion one was between six and eight months total across the three departments, but to stand up a single solution for the single department was about a month and a half. So not too bad, especially for one guy just plugging at it when he’s got time in between his other work and that’s what’s nice about it. Again, it’s quick to develop, quick to design and then it’s got an endless capacity to grow and change.

So it’s really the man behind the curtain that just does anything that could be automated, we use Workflow to do that. We use it for notifications mostly, but again, just trying to make anything that can be offloaded to the system, we handle it in Workflow.

We have integrations there where people can add and interact with their cases directly from their Outlook environment. So yeah, it’s an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s as powerful as you spend the time to make it.

At first, that feels very limiting. But then you work with it a bit and it’s actually incredibly freeing because if you work inside of the confines, you can do whatever you want. And so it’s incredibly difficult for me to leave WorkView and go into things like documents or just working with scripts and other applications that aren’t as trusting of its developers. So that’s definitely my favorite part about working with it.

How many cases does an employee have? Are we meeting our SLAs? Who’s the case crusher for last month? And we have a dashboard that shows the case crusher. That’s the technical engineer that’s closed the most cases in the month and for the quarter, they get a little, you know, attaboy, that’s actually friendly competition within the team as to who’s going to be the case crusher. So that’s a positive. And the fact that, as Patrick said, we’re able to modify and customize the solution to what our needs are and those needs change. So as they change, the solution’s able to change, so that’s another positive.

Right.

It’s not perfect, but it does all of that, creates the case, assigns the case to a technical engineer based on several pieces of criteria that are within the system. And the stress of monitoring the email inbox went away, so it’s been great. We’ve automated that, so it’s taken time away from cases to monitor it that now our engineers can put towards solving cases and getting those things resolved. Probably the next item with the solution would be case engagements. The team’s good but with over 200 modules, we can’t be experts in all modules and there are times when we need to pull in an expert from one of the other departments within ImageSoft.

That used to be an external email to say, “Hey, can we get someone to do this?” And then they would add themselves to the older system as a resource. Within our solution now, it’s type in the information about the case that you need assistance with and click a button and it sends the case to that department for assigning to an individual to work it. You see all of that within the view of the case. I have to give props to Nathan because he was the one that developed the case engagement process and it really has helped Customer Care get a resource quicker and be able to monitor and make sure that the cases progresses and closes more efficiently with all of it being in the solution.

Okay, so a lot of automation. Steve, is there anything that needs improvement, in your mind, with the solution?

Because the data’s in our production database, but it’s getting the reporting database in place that we can get that query and run it and it’s not going to affect other departments or OnBase as a whole. That’s probably the biggest area for improvement. The other one, and it’s really kind of small, is on our case notes fields, people are used to copying and pasting. And the pasting of images doesn’t work as well in the notes fields. If you use the import tool that they have, it works very great. But just a right click copy, right click paste doesn’t always function as correctly.

That’s something that is beyond our control, so that’s something that Hyland’s working on, they’re aware of. I expect it to improve in the next iteration. We’re on, I think 18, is that correct, Nathan? I don’t know the exact version, but I think that will improve over the next iteration of OnBase.

Our previous solution wasn’t as robust as the portal is right now and it just helps with the communication. So a customer that’s busy doesn’t have time to get on the phone can log in, create a quick case and we can respond to that within our SLA without stopping what we’re doing or whenever the case comes in, it’s auto-assigned, one of our engineers receives it and they begin to work it. So I think that’s been the biggest improvement and it allows the customer’s management team to monitor and manage those escalated cases on their side, as well.

… as far as measuring productivity improvement with the [crosstalk 00:26:53]?

And we can narrow that down. That’s the nice thing. I can filter that. That’s my team, but I could take a look at it from an individual perspective, go down to the specific employee or I could go up and look at it from Customer Care team two or for Customer Care as the department.

We also have in the works for the portal, which feeds into another piece of our application, a walk through for the solution health check. Right now, our solution health check specialist sends out a questionnaire to the customer via email of, “Here’s the pieces of information that we’d like to gather for your solution.” We’re working on making that a web-based walk through that the customer can just enter that information as they gather it into the portal.

It’ll populate into our solution and allow us to create their solution health check automatically with that information. So I think that’ll help with some efficiencies and cut down on the time spent on a Go To Meeting for the customers reviewing their solution as they do a dive into their system, looking for things to improve the stability and functionality of that solution.

Hey, it does. Yeah, thank you, Steve.

Nathan, I know that we run OnBase and all corners. At ImageSoft, you’re the OnBase administrator. Specifically, with Customer Care, how often do you get involved in administrating their solution?

And even if that may do this in the future doesn’t happen for a month, six months, a year or two years, whatever it may be, at least you’re going to have the ability to do that because you are able to look at that broad picture. I think Patrick would agree with this next statement, but we have a few designs that I would absolutely love to change and redo, but because we’re so deep into the system, the amount of work it would take would be astronomical.

So we have taken those experiences to say, “When we build something new, what might happen to this in the future?” Or, “How can we make small tweaks to it to make it a little more flexible down the line?”

But in the early days, if you’re willing to spend the time to say, “Oh, I’ve hit this wall. I need to redesign.” It’s worth it to lose a week to save yourself months in the future.

If you want to contact me, give me an email, anything like that. Then lastly, outside of demos and things like that, I would be a little familiar with data modeling, to some basic concepts. Because at its core, that’s what this module is. It’s modeling data in the way that you want. So if you have a good foundation in that, it’s really going to help you start building your first solution quickly.

And then two, second key point, is a subject matter expert from the business unit itself that understands the challenge best, they can configure the solution and I think that’s pretty huge. So instead of having just two options of building or buying a solution, there’s that third option. If you’ve got this platform, you could just configure your solution.

And then lastly, as you pointed out, Nathan, OnBase has got all these prepackaged solutions to get you up and running as quickly as possible. So incident management is just one, but there’s a host of other ones out there to cut down on implementation costs. So guys, Patrick, Steve, Nathan, thank you for being on the call today. It’s been a wonderful discussion. I’m so impressed with all the work that you guys have done.

And for our listeners, we appreciate you downloading this podcast. If you’d like to learn more about ImageSoft, please visit our website at imagesoftinc.com. So this concludes our podcast. Thank you and have a great day.

Thanks again for joining us on this podcast. To learn more about ImageSoft, please visit imagesoftinc.com. That’s imagesoftI-N-C.com. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to Paperless Productivity where we tackle some of the biggest paper-based pain points facing organizations today. We’ll see you next time.