Spectrum Care achieves greater “person-centredness” with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Spectrum Care awarded the prestigious silver award...

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 their services users. They wanted 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.

The Pain

The previous system didn’t encompass the goals and needs of the whole organisation. 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,” says Justin Walsh, Spectrum Care’s Communications and Relationships Manager.

“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’,” he adds.

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. “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".