“The platform has kept with our growth over the years. We’re up to 19 employees now and Litify has been with us every step of the way. If someone wants to start tracking something new, we can easily build it. Even today someone said, “Hey, I want to start tracking XYZ. I need a checkbox or a dropdown or a pick list.” I had it live and ready to go in five minutes,” Cheryl Carlyon, Director, Finance and Operations, Commonwealth Community Trust

Commonwealth Community Trust is a non-profit organization that administers special needs trusts for people with disabilities. The trusts can be third-party where the family is making future plans for a loved one or first-party where someone with a disability is receiving funds from personal injury or workers’ compensation cases, social security payments, or a direct inheritance.

We spoke with Cheryl Carlyon, Director of Finance and Operations at CCT. She wears a lot of different hats at the organization, but one of them is overseeing the evaluation, research, and implementation of their technology initiatives.

Before Litify

What challenges were you experiencing before Litify?

Before Litify, we were in Time Matters. A technology that we tried our best to modify and use in a way that made sense to our organization, but it was a real struggle because it wasn’t a very customizable platform. We were limited on what information we could even put in the system and have it make sense to how we wanted to track it, such as capturing information from clients, making notes, or generating letters. For example, to generate a letter, we had to manually copy-paste line by line to get what we needed.

Because we needed to capture a lot of different types of data and the old platform wasn’t supporting us, we sometimes put it on a spreadsheet instead. But then if someone doesn’t keep it updated, the information gets outdated quickly. Now with Litify, all our data is entered into the system and our reports are run on real-time data.

Finally, we’re growing quickly and pride ourselves on quality customer service, and all this was really slowing us down.

When did you start looking for a new solution?

Our President & CEO found Litify at a conference when she was walking around the event hall. We were there as a vendor because we also fit into the legal services space. As a non-profit organization that serves people with special needs, we work a lot with personal injury attorneys, and elder and estate planning attorneys to help set up trusts for their clients. We’re not your typical Litify client or use case, but this unique application shows the flexibility and power of the platform.

Making the change to Litify

What stood out as you were evaluating Litify?

As Litify is built on Salesforce, the configurability of the platform was one of the biggest draws — we wanted to build it out however we wanted. It’s really improved how we’re able to get information, get it quickly, and have it be accurate. There was a lot of confidence in Litify given it’s built on the Salesforce platform.

How was your implementation?

We worked with an implementation partner, NeuraFlash. That team helped us import all our field data, notes, documents, and more into Litify. We were very involved because we know the data and you have to be involved as the client and end-user, but an implementation partner can help do the heavy lifting, which is nice. It’s a big project, but they helped it go smoothly.

The platform is also pretty intuitive. Once we did the initial training with our team, they were off and running with it.

Life with Litify

Fast forward five years, how is Litify benefitting the organization?

We have a high bar set with our clients, and when we can pull up each record instantly and understand their situation at a glance, we’re able to make the experience very individualized. Every client is different, but we’re able to capture and share the information in a way that’s curated for them and helps them in a more effective way.

The platform has kept up with our growth over the years. We’re up to 19 employees now and Litify has been with us every step of the way. If someone wants to start tracking something new, we can easily build it. Even today someone said, “Hey, I want to start tracking XYZ. I need a checkbox or a dropdown or a pick list.” I had it live and ready to go in five minutes.

We have endless opportunities to capture the data we want and then use it to make decisions and help our clients. For example, we use an add-on called Nintex, which helps us with document creation and form letters. We use the role records feature of Litify to identify parties involved in a person’s trust. An attorney could be on trust A and trust B because they have a one-to-many relationship. We use the role record, and then through the role record, we have a form letter tool, so we can write a letter to the attorney and automatically pull in the letter catered to the attorney, and then write the letter to the client and automatically pull in the right letter again.

What’s next on your journey with Litify?

We’re planning a project with our financial partner who administers our trusts to get an API back from their financial portal into Litify. Right now, advocates can log in and make disbursement requests from the trust accounts, check balances, and view their statements. When they contact us to update their address, contact, or other profile information, we’d like to be able to update that data once but have it be applied to both Litify and the portal. From a data integrity perspective, bad data is just the same as no data, so we want to tie all that together.

And on that note, we’re interested in Litify’s Client Portal. We pride ourselves on the fact that when our clients call, we pick up the phone — there’s no press one, press two. If it rings, we answer and either help you right away or connect you with the person who can. But we also recognize that self-service is increasingly an expectation and can provide additional benefits to that client experience. That’s a natural next step for us and we’re excited to see how we could add that on so that our clients can also self-service their account information and updates as we’re working with them.