About Reconnect NZ

Based in Auckland, New Zealand’s most populous and culturally diverse city, Reconnect Family Services is a non-government organisation that delivers community services. Specifically, Reconnect offers a variety of programmes for at risk young people.  They help young people learn, make the right choices, reintegrate back into education and training, rebuild relationships with their whanau, and imagine solid goals for themselves.

Reconnect’s programmes offer these young people a chance to re-build a future many believe they are incapable of achieving. They are known for taking on the most challenging of clients, not giving in easily, and healing the wider family dynamic so our young people have the best chance at positive life outcomes.

Reconnect employs a highly trained team of mentors, youth workers, caregivers, and case workers to offer a friendly face that adds value at every step of the programme. One-on-one, face-to-face mentoring helps these young people imagine a life away from crime, violence, drug abuse and self-harm.  Each young person has the chance to consider another path they might take, in a safe and stable family environment.

Overview

After years of using spreadsheets, timesheets, calendars and emails to schedule appointments, Reconnect reached out to Skedulo for a solution that would help them be more efficient, streamline scheduling, and centralise communications. 

Legacy tools made scheduling time-consuming and inefficient  

Reconnect has traditionally relied on timesheets, spreadsheets, calendars, emails and phone calls to schedule caregivers for appointments. 

These manual systems were incredibly time consuming with no ability to centralise communications. This meant caregivers had to source information about a job from multiple sources, with no way to document notes for easy future reference.

George Lowe, Business Analyst for Reconnect, recognised the need for systemisation as soon as he joined the team. “It was very difficult to get head or tail of where everyone was at,” says George. “We relied solely on manual systems to record jobs which made our processes very time consuming and open to human error. 

“It was also a very loud operation. Everyone in the office would be on the phone at the same time trying to relay information to caregivers.” 

Without an efficient system to support the team, George says mistakes were common – ranging from unrecorded phone calls to incorrect dispatching or billing, with no way to know for sure where mistakes were being made.

“We deal with young people who are at risk, so mistakes are not an option. If we need to be there for a child, we must be there. If we need to arrange emergency housing, it must be done quickly and efficiently. There is no room for error, and we must have absolute certainty that every job is set up and completed correctly.”

Knowing there had to be a better way, George’s team began investigating solutions. They went through a significantly lengthy process of benchmarking different systems before choosing Skedulo. 

“We shortlisted a variety of products from local and overseas vendors. But some of the solutions required us to house on-premise servers or pay for dedicated Cloud servers. This would have incurred significant overheads which we were not comfortable with. 

“When we discovered Skedulo could run on a Salesforce backend and had been backed by Microsoft, we were very interested. The clincher for us was being able to customise our solution quickly and easily, without extensive developer fees. We were also happy that Skedulo has an Australian base. In New Zealand, we’re quite fond of the Aussies!”