When a large sum of money changes hands—whether through a loan, assistance, or even a purchase—large sums of documentation tend to accompany it. That’s just a fact of life. But while money makes the world go round, the paperwork involved tends to slow everything down to a crawl.
The people at Community Brands know this challenge all too well. In our most recent webinar, hosted by the Intelligent Automation Network, Kendra Foss, Community Brands’ Product Manager for K12 Financial Aid Solutions, explains the pain points her organization experiences each year as they process thousands of documents to determine eligibility for assistance.
When families submit their financial aid applications, they also need to attach any relevant documents that confirm the information they’ve provided. Community Brands then needs to go through each application for the arduous task of document verification, which includes poring over tax forms, bank statements, and more. It’s a mind-numbing amount of data to contend with, which is why the work was previously outsourced to a specialized vendor. But as Kendra explained, manual verification is not without its problems, and she clued us all in to the three biggest issues her team faced:
- Speed — It could take 10 to 12 business days just to verify that Community Brands had received the correct and most up-to-date documents for each application. That’s two weeks before they could even look at the actual information the documents contain.
- Accuracy — Once they did get to looking at the information contained in each document, it needed to be keyed into Community Brands’ systems. When performed manually—one person entering data from one document—Kendra found it was done with less than 70% accuracy.
- Privacy — By handing over entire documents to the data entry team, the privacy of each family was compromised. Important and sensitive financial information was on display to whomever was tasked with entering the information.
It was clear that this way of doing things wasn’t sustainable, and Community Brands’ search for a better solution led them to ScaleHub. By deploying our one-of-a-kind mix of AI and crowdsourcing, they saw dramatic improvements in each area. In Kendra’s words:
- We cut document verification time from two weeks to less than two days, a reduction of 85%.
- Accuracy in data entry improved to 99%.
- The way our technology works is inherently secure, as information is broken down into bite-sized snippets with no context for meaning or importance.
For Community Brands, the sum of these improvements has been a 30% year-over-year savings in operating costs, and a significant increase in happy customers.
Learn more
To see more about how ScaleHub helped Community Brands, and how it could help you, watch a recording of the webinar here.
