NSW Trustee and Guardian

NSW Trustee & Guardian needed a ‘create once, publish everywhere’ solution for scheduling and managing pop-up locations. This was critical to eliminate double publishing of their content in different systems. Morpht developed a solution that integrates their CRM, Customer Portal, Google Maps, Geolocation, and Drupal to deliver a seamless user experience when searching for a service location.

Overview

Drupal 9 | UX Design | Solution architecture | Systems integrations

NSW Trustee & Guardian protects, promotes and supports the rights, dignity, choices and wishes of the people of NSW. They do this by providing a range of services including Will making, estate planning, executorship, trustee, financial management and guardianship services.

Integral to these services is a facility which enables NSW residents to find a service location and book an appointment. To assist with this requirement Morpht developed functionality that provided a platform for this activity. See Our Locations search.

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The challenge

NSW Trustee & Guardian needed a ‘create once, publish everywhere’ solution for scheduling and managing pop-up locations. This was especially critical to minimise workload and eliminate double publishing of their pop-up locations which change on a weekly basis.

While pop-up location data is managed in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, booking an appointment is handled by another system running on a Customer Services Portal.

This opened up the opportunity for us to create a solution that bridges those two systems with Drupal.

The solution

Working with the NSW Trustee & Guardian IT team, Morpht initially completed a Discovery & Define phase where we identified the project requirements and clearly articulated what success would look like. This included collating the data we needed, investigating the connection protocols with the CRM to collect the data, documenting the complexities of the solution and producing wireframes & designs to represent the final outcome.

NSW Trustee & Guardians website on devices

CRM feed

Exposing a data feed out of Dynamics CRM, we created pop-up locations in Drupal, one for each location-date and deleted expired records. We extended each record with canned information such as the type of services available at each location and the contact details.

To allow users to book an appointment at each location, we generated a dynamic link formatted to align with the Customer Service Portal and surfaced that through a booking button.

The hub for this 3 part system is, of course, Drupal where location data is stored, classified and updated daily.

The user experience

We made it easier for a NSW Trustee customer to find a nearby location by searching by their postcode, suburb, or even their current location. They see a selection of locations with contact details pinned on a map, providing direction information, and book an appointment to meet with a representative. This seamless experience belies a complexity of interaction between 3 highly integrated systems.

How we built it - React.js

When building the location finder solution, we elected to use React.js, which is ideal for single-page applications; (apps that can update content on a web page without refreshing the page). The autosuggest function and search result are lightning fast.

REACT is a suitable solution as it leverages off a component-based structure which is in keeping with modern day coding practises. These ‘reusable’ components mean the outcome will have a consistent look and feel and will load quicker, providing better on-site performance for site visitors.

Integrating with Google Maps

Integrating with third party services such as Google Maps API provides the opportunity to improve the user experience further. Here, using Google Maps allowed Morpht to include a simple ‘Get directions’ option for each of the locations.

Community events

Customer consultations at pop-up locations can also be considered as community engagement events, where customers can engage with the NSW Trustee and Guardian to learn more about their service and get support.

So why not surface the location data on the Community Events section of the site as well? And that we did. We extended the events view to support the location content type and installed facets to allow users to filter by event types.

Systems integration

We integrated data feeds from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, linked up locations to the Customer Service Portal for booking a service and augmented the location information with Google Maps for users to find their nearest service centre and get directions.

The outcome

It took some work! Especially after resolving the complexities of the Pop-up location requirements, NSW Trustee & Guardian now have a system in place that provides a seamless user experience. The service information is reliably up to date being automated from the CRM. They reduce content management effort with a 'create once, publish everywhere' solution.

Previously our team spent a significant amount of time uploading pop-up locations on both Drupal and our CRM. However, the integration greatly improved our efficiency as our CRM became the only platform we had to manage. Drupal is now able to pick up all the information about the pop-up locations from our CRM and upload it to our website. The integration also allowed Drupal to recognise when our events expire and will automatically un-publish them, which ensures we have the most up-to-date information on our website.

Michelle Bui
Acting Marketing Officer | Customer Experience