Explore Participants, Public Complaints, Referrals, and Applications

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how complaint and case participants work.
  
• Explain the purpose of the public complaint object.
  
• Describe the purpose of the referral object.
  
• Explain the purpose of the application object.
  

Participants

Let’s start our journey by learning about participant objects, which represent the constituents and organizations that you work with or serve. Because Case Management is a people-centric solution, participants lie at the core of the data model.

As with many other Salesforce apps, you track important details about the constituents and organizations you work with in Account and Contact objects. In Public Sector Solutions, you can connect accounts or contacts to other records by adding them as participants.

A participant is any individual or organization involved in a case or complaint. You can set one of the following objects as a participant on a record.

• Person account, which combines fields from business accounts and contacts to represent an individual
  
• Business account, which represents any organization, such as another government agency, a nonprofit service provider, or a household
  

Here’s a diagram showing the relationships between these objects. A participant represents a person account or business account, and each type of account has a connected contact.

To understand the visual components of data model diagrams, see the Salesforce Data Model Notation.

You’ll see how participants connect to other case management objects throughout this module.

Add participants to complaints, cases, and other objects by searching for existing accounts or contacts, or create new participants directly from the record. Complaint participants are the people involved in a complaint. Case participants are the people involved in a case.

You can define the role and status of each participant in a complaint or a case. When you set up your org, configure selectable picklist values for these fields to support your case types and processes.

For example, Eric Cirelli, a concerned constituent, calls the city to report that he witnessed his elderly neighbor, Steve Marshall, driving erratically in the neighborhood. The intake officer identifies Eric as the Reporter and Steve as the Subject and adds them as participants by connecting their person accounts.

The list of complaint participants appears in the complaint record.

This table summarizes the role of each object related to participants and its relationship to other Case Management objects. You can also see some examples from the erratic driving complaint.

Public Sector Solutions lets you assemble individual constituents into party relationship groups to better track associations between them and capture important details about the group. For example, use party relationship groups to organize family members under a common household record, or combine a set of cohorts who are enrolled in the same session of a program. To learn more about party relationship groups, see the Manage Party Relationship Groups in Public Sector Solutions Help article.

You now understand how the Participant object stores important data about constituents. Next, we explore the Case Management objects for managing intake.

Public Complaints, Referrals, and Applications

The employees at the City of Cosville Department of Social Services know that understanding a problem is the first step toward solving it. Their efforts to provide assistance depend greatly on constituents' ability to easily voice concerns or request help directly, so open lines of communication are critical to their success. And they need to route constituents to other agencies and appropriate services based on the situation.

In Case Management, there are three ways that constituents enter the system: public complaints, referrals, and applications.

Here’s a look at how these objects connect to the participant objects you just learned about. Participants connect to referral, individual application, complaint participant, and public complaint objects.

Notice that a single public complaint can have multiple participants. Also, a referral can have multiple clients, referrers, and providers listed as participants.

Let’s find out more about public complaints, referrals, and applications.

Public Complaint

Just as Eric did in the earlier example, constituents submit public complaints over the phone, through email, or by filling out a web form to register concerns to your agency. In Public Sector Solutions, complaints typically relate to the health, safety, or well-being of another person in the community.

Using the complaint intake guided flow, an intake officer completes initial assessments and prescreening. They capture important details, such as the date and location of the incident, the participants involved, and allegations.

Guided flows and dynamic assessments ensure the intake officer asks the right questions depending on the situation and type of complaint. To learn more about dynamic assessments, see the Dynamic Assessments with Public Sector Solutions module on Trailhead.

The officer may also choose to quickly capture remarks from concerned community members in the Running Notes section of the complaint record, and then fill out necessary form fields later. If they receive more information after the initial intake, they can add these details to the complaint even after submission.

The case manager reviews the complaint and determines the best course of action. If necessary, they convert the complaint to a case and assign a caseworker to engage with the constituent in need of support. We explore cases later in this module.

Referral

Government agencies create referrals to connect participants with benefits and programs that other agencies offer, community organizations, or external service providers that can best resolve a particular issue.

The referral record in Case Management contains fields to track the client and case, the referral source, the requested provider, and the outcome of the referral. Referrals to your organization are inbound referrals, and referrals that you route to outside organizations are outbound referrals. You can assign priorities to referrals and track their outcome on the referral record.

Here’s a referral that Connor, a Cosville caseworker, creates to request the enrollment of a constituent into a grief counseling program.

As with public complaints, you can set up guided flows and dynamic assessments to define necessary input parameters, capture notes quickly, and create cases directly from the referral. Set up automation to route referrals based on specified inputs to speed up the delivery of services to clients.

Application

Constituents may choose to file an application through an online portal to request benefits or to enroll in programs that your organization (or another service provider) administers. With dynamic forms, you can simplify the application process by only showing fields that are relevant to the context of the request. Constituents can upload related files and images to supplement their applications.

Set up approval processes for reviewers to evaluate the application and determine the constituent’s eligibility for programs and benefits, or use the Business Rules Engine to quickly determine eligibility based on automatic calculations. Configure email notifications to alert the applicant when the status of their application changes, or route the application back to the constituent when further details are needed. When an application is complete, attach the form as a PDF to relevant records, such as cases.

This table shows the context and relationship of referrals, complaints, and applications to other Case Management objects, and gives a few examples.

Now that you know about the different means of intake in Case Management, let’s explore cases, programs, and benefits in the next unit.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Configure Case and Complaint Participants
• Salesforce Help: Person Accounts
• Salesforce Help: Manage Party Relationship Groups in Public Sector Solutions
• Salesforce Help: Social Well-Being Concerns in Public Sector Solutions
• Salesforce Help: Case Referrals in Public Sector Solutions