Company Overview: DCPCSB’s mission is to ensure that students and families in Washington, DC have access to quality public charter school education. This is achieved by setting tough academic standards, using a comprehensive charter application review process and effective oversight, providing meaningful support and actively involving parents, school leaders, the community and policy makers.
Problem: DCPCSB needed the ability and functionality to accept and manage complaints from school parents, staff and community members, as well as other stakeholders. This information needed to be accessible to various parties within the school and there needed to be a reliable historical record of complaints to follow-up on and to pull monthly and year-end reports from. The application also needed to be easy for all users to adopt.
Solution: DCPCSB was already using Salesforce to utilize Bearsolutions’ “CHARM” product, which stores annual financial data on the member Charter Schools, but they wanted to expand their Salesforce instance to manage school complaints and concerns. To meet the needs of DCPCSB’s complaint system requirements, Buan Consulting created a complaint tracking system application with customized case object and page layout to track attributes of complaints and concerns of parents, employees and teachers of the Charter Schools that the D.C. Public Charter School Board oversees.
Buan Consulting also created a custom button on the case page layout to allow staff to email other school staff members when a complaint comes in for their school, and pre-populate the email fields based on the School (Account) record. To assist in ease of the complaint and reporting process, an email template was developed to summarize the complaint information and to notify the school of the complaint details, and web-to-case was enabled so that schools could reply directly back to the DCPCSB general complaint email address to be saved directly into Salesforce. For tracking and reporting purposes, custom reports and a dashboard were created to measure metrics of the complaints that are entered.
Benefits/Results: With the new complaint tracking system application, DCPCSB staff are able to more quickly intake a complaint and apply any updates between the school and caller, as well as easily send the school a summary of the complaint just after they enter it into the system, allowing the school to be notified faster. In addition, staff members can easily look up a caller to see if they’ve logged a complaint in the past, and reporting updates are in real-time with scheduled dashboard updates each morning. With the new application, task reminders are auto-created in the system, allowing staff to create automatic reminders to follow-up on complaints to streamline the complaint process.