The Client

As a Special Disability Accommodation (SDA) provider, Annica specialises in providing emergency and full-time accommodation services for care providers and their participants. There is currently a low supply of suitable properties for NDIS participants, as a result, many are living in undesirable or vulnerable conditions, unable to obtain accommodation suitable for their unique needs. Annica leverages its vast networks and experience to find and furnish properties to ensure participants can live a comfortable life with all their living comforts catered for. By providing emergency accommodation tailored to short and mid-term needs, along with the flexibility to transition seamlessly into long-term housing that is custom-built, Annica is driving equality for those living with a disability and ultimately improving lives.

The Challenge

Annica was grappling with how to service the increasing demand as the need for suitable accommodation continued to grow. The organisation was being hampered by manual administrative tasks and arduous processing activities while also ensuring it maintained compliance in a heavily regulated industry. From coordinating inbound requests and actioning maintenance requirements to organising bespoke equipment and keeping track of inventory to incur minimal losses, both the emergency and permanent accommodation services were quickly becoming unmanageable for the team.

The business recognised it would be unable to scale and meet growing customer demand if it maintained its current operating environment. Annica sought a scalable solution that could automate menial tasks as well as gain more clarity on customer requirements whilst remaining compliant. The solution needed to offer a single source of truth to house important customer information and be able to handle increased client interactions across a range of channels. Finally, the solution needed to reduce business risks, gather data insights and ensure an ROI for the business following implementation. 

The Solution

Annica recently engaged V2 to successfully establish the organisation’s online web presence. The businesses again turned to V2 to improve the web experience by establishing a portal through which Annica staff, participants, carers and other authorised users can self-serve and engage with Annica. 

The objective of the portal was to channel customer interactions through workflows that would attain richer customer information, automate processes, deliver faster response times and give clear action points for Annica staff to action. Additionally, the portal was designed to assist with auditing and compliance reporting. It has been established with future-state use cases in mind, such as mobile and tablet applications and chatbots with the required foundational elements needed to support these built into the portal framework. 

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system was a core requirement to collect all the information gathered through the portal, automating and streamline processes, and create a centralised customer view. This provided a real-time snapshot of the status for all Annica staff, carers, participants and other interested parties and a central location to manage all requests, contacts, services, accommodation and equipment,  enabling automation and workflows.

V2 evaluated a number of established pragmatic decisions for a short-list of SaaS-based CRM providers to determine which would best deliver the project’s core requirements. The selected CRM is fully configurable and provides work management capabilities out of the box. A comprehensive suite of additional features are available in the CRM so it can grow as the business needs evolve. 

The React framework, Next.js, was selected to provide a simplified and streamlined user experience. Next.js blends traditional server-side technologies (e.g. WordPress / PHP) with modern client-side web applications (e.g. React and Vue.js), creating flexible full-stack Web solutions with a single tool and achieving the best of both worlds. For on-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Next.js enables the rapid implementation of technical fundamentals such as Open Graph, JSON-LD, sitemap.xml generation, metadata, accessibility, and other features. 

To underpin the portal and associated website, Annica required a cloud solution that was reliable, secure and robust to maintain performance during high engagement periods. To achieve this, we turned to AWS Serverless solutions providing capacity to scale, outstanding reliability and increased security to protect the sensitive data being stored. This approach, alongside CloudFront, Lambda, S3, Cognito, DynamoDB and Simple Email Service enabled Annica to leverage pay-per-use billing to efficiently accommodate low and high traffic periods.

A simplified view of the solution implemented is shown below.

In this solution, Annica staff, carers and other permitted parties sign into the Annica portal using Cognito services. This provides the authentication and authorisation elements needed to determine what elements of the portal individuals are able to access and the granular permissions within that scope. 

The Annica portal itself is accessible via Route 53 and front-ended by CloudFront. Static website elements are stored in an S3 bucket with dynamic elements being retrieved using AWS Lambda functions from the CRM and cached into a DynamoDB table. AWS Lambda was selected for its low operational overhead and elastic scalability. 

With AWS Serverless technologies, Annica is unconstrained from the limits of legacy IT. Each service scales independently to accommodate load fluctuations with multi-availability zone resilience to keep everything running when unforeseen events occur. The AWS consumption-based cost model keeps costs in alignment with demand and removes waste from unused or underutilised resources.

Tools such as the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) were adopted to achieve a high degree of accessibility for the site. This was paramount given the types of users engaging with the portal.

Business Outcomes

V2 Digital successfully established a portal for Annica that enabled staff, carers and other relevant parties to interact in a centralised way in real-time. By replacing the current manual methods, email and phone, the response time to requests has been accelerated from day to hours, considerably improving the carer experience. 

Following the portal's launch, customer acquisition increased by 200% over previous volumes and enabled a 17% reduction in IT costs within the first three months of implementation.

Additionally, the solution established was specifically designed to lay the foundations for future platform features. These can include complex data analytics and visualisation, integration with billing and payment systems, automated generation of audit and regulatory requirements, and centrally managed and controlled physical access to accommodation.

In Summary 

Through establishing this portal, a core pillar in Annica’s 2023 - 2026 digital strategy, V2 has enabled business growth and improved responsiveness and efficiency to Annica’s services and support capability. By taking a holistic, event-driven approach, V2’s solution has dramatically improved the end-customer experience and positively impacted Annica’s bottom line through reduced IT costs. To ensure sustainability, the comprehensive foundational platform allows Annica to continue to build upon and develop its digital transformation optimising customer engagement and driving data insights.

By taking advantage of modern technology, Annica laid the foundations to take the business to the next level, providing best-in-class services and an intuitive and enjoyable user journey to support people in need.