Wisconsin licensing agency says Salesforce upgrade will put customers first – StateScoop

With a 1.6-star score on Google Maps, the Wisconsin Division of Security and Skilled Providers isn’t the general public’s favourite place. However the company is attempting to rebuild its repute with a current improve to a decades-old occupation licensing platform.

The division just lately introduced a $6 million challenge to swap out its 35-year-old legacy platform, which officers mentioned was cobbled collectively from a jumble of guide and digital processes it inherited when the company was fashioned in 2011. Over the previous six months, the division’s know-how has been modernized by Salesforce and an integrator, MTX Group, officers mentioned.

“The world is actually transferring at a sooner tempo, and we’ve seen our quantity of labor exponentially develop,” mentioned Daniel Hereth, the division’s assistant deputy secretary. “I believe the motion in know-how has actually been to empower the purchasers to drive processes ahead.”

Professionals from throughout Wisconsin depend on the Division of Security and Skilled Providers for licenses they should work or run companies — together with nurses, cosmetologists, constructing contractors and academics. However over time, tons of of dissatisfied staff have taken to Google to vent and depart one-star opinions, complaining of poor customer support, understaffed places of work and months-long waits to obtain licenses they’d already paid for.

“Final week I used to be on maintain for two hours when somebody answered, she took my primary info and mentioned she’d ship me to the proper division, I used to be on maintain for one more quarter-hour after which the decision simply ended,” a reviewer named Crystal Norris wrote.

Hereth mentioned the brand new platform alters how the state interacts each with its clients and out of doors events concerned within the licensing course of, like faculties and employers. He mentioned the brand new platform “empowers” clients and locations them on the heart of his company’s processes, whereas placing a ways between the state and people third events, which can now feed knowledge into the brand new system, quite than dealing immediately with the division.

“Basically, it was actually essential that we maximize our relationship with the applicant and empower them to work with the relationships that they’ve and the folks that they work with on to receive the fabric crucial to maneuver the method ahead,” he mentioned.

Earlier than the improve, the “overwhelming majority” of licenses required folks to finish paper purposes, mentioned Jennifer Garrett, the division’s public affairs director. That meant filling out a kind, mailing it in after which ready for an individual to manually enter the data into a pc.

Past the price financial savings, Garrett mentioned one of many largest points of interest of a cloud-based platform like Salesforce is that the state can guarantee the brand new system stays present because the years cross.

“There was a time when authorities would see an innovation someplace else after which create a authorities model of it that always was shut however not fairly what customers have been experiencing elsewhere,” she mentioned. “That sort of created the impression that authorities simply couldn’t do issues the identical method because the non-public sector or that interacting with the federal government was all the time going to be extra irritating.”

Hereth mentioned Salesforce’s security measures, together with its compliance with FedRAMP, have been one other draw, as a result of businesses “have entry to an unimaginable quantity of PII that more and more have turn into targets for malicious actors.”

As a result of Salesforce had these options, there was no must “reinvent the wheel” and develop an in-house customized answer, he mentioned.

“I believe that’s the place we will ship what our clients want in a method they’re extra accustomed to,” Garrett mentioned, “and perhaps even shock them that it may be a quite seamless expertise to work together with the federal government.”