Client: Ulster County Department of Health
Summary: Quickly moved the in-person COVID hotline to at-home remote setup without downtime and without code
I can't believe how fast Cedric and his team got this up and running.
- Director of Innovation
Problem:
Its the first week of COVID quarantine, there are 21 people in a small room taking calls, walking paper reports up, unmasked, tired, confused, and the engineer hired to re-write the code to update database is out sick, possibly with COVID.
We gotta get everyone out of the same room.
Solution:
We wanted the solution to rely on as little code as possible incase I became sick too.
Under the pressures of the situation we were empowered to bring in any software we needed assuming we could train the staff to use it.
After shadowing the call center staff and mapping the flow of data, we went to work discovery a set of no-code tools that allowed us to recreate every handoff.
In the end the solutions were boring and common, which were perfect for training and resiliency.
We used Airtable as our CRM and datastore, Google Forms for call intake, and Telzio for soft phone call routing and call menu builder, and Microsoft Teams for internal communication and coordination.
Acknowledgements:
None of this would have been possible without my amazing team Phil Horvath and Eliza Edge. And inside the county, there were a few people who were paramount to our success, Tim Weidemann, Jeff Kalpakis, Hillary Harvey and many others.
Sometimes code isn't the answer
No code refers to the process of using tools and platforms that allow you to build technical solutions that previously would have required code to accomplish.
The advantages of no code solutions include:
Of course, this comes with tradeoffs: