Christians Against Poverty UK

CAP UK’s existing solutions for its debt advice services were no longer fit for purpose. PHP-based, their complexity and inflexibility were inhibiting them from providing the scale and level of service CAP UK wanted. Each aspect, from budget management to capturing information and documents from clients, was disconnected, with its data siloed. It was difficult to bring together all the necessary information about each client – such as matching up an item of documentation to a budget record – to gain a full picture of a client’s progress, and communicate this to them along with the proposed next steps.

Using this legacy setup, they struggled to adequately control and monitor tasks, provide visibility on cases to both debt coaches on the frontline dealing directly with clients, and debt advisors at head office, and ensure clients were given the advice they needed at the right times and actions were followed up quickly. The overall user experience (UX) was poor and users needed to manually re-enter data or re-upload documents, from one system to another, resulting in missed details, quality issues and increased workloads. Onboarding new debt advice clients was slow and laborious.

With all these issues, plus the difficulty of hiring and expense of maintaining in-house PHP developers, CAP UK wanted  a more flexible and cost-effective cloud-based platform. They needed a solution that could more quickly and easily be evolved to meet their changing needs, and would allow them to take advantage of new functionality and innovation. Most importantly, their new solution had to empower their hard-working advisors to truly make the most of their knowledge and skills – and deliver the large volume of urgent support clients needed as they struggled with debt.

In only 14 weeks of development, across seven sprints, VRP brought together all CAP UK’s vital tools into a single, seamlessly connected system. This new solution, based on Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, unifies budget management, client information capture and document capture – previously three disparate tools. Merging all three into one and linking the records makes it easy for CAP’s users to perform searches, see connected documents and data, capture and amend information, and gain a single view of the client. They now have a “single source of truth”, with data easily accessible, providing a comprehensive view of each client – all users need to do is click on a case to see all the important information. Crucially, with this new solution, visibility of a client’s case plan is accessible to both debt coaches and debt advisors, whereas previously it was only the advisors. This means that coaches can play a more active role in supporting the client.

The solution includes a budget-builder tool, case management functionality, and recommended next best actions. Using Salesforce Experience Cloud, VRP also created a web portal via which debt coaches can onboard new clients, including capturing vital information and documents such as bills, for the debt advisors and clients to work with when making debt-management plans. All of this empowers CAP UK to provide the best help and advice, and manage and track work far more efficiently than ever before.