Case study: IFG Group, school caterer
Working with Impact Foods Group to create a new catering refund portal.
The problem
Manually processing refunds was longwinded, and very complex. Without access to balances or pupil information, it was difficult to ensure the refund was correct.
Because Impact Food Group cater for multiple schools, they process around thirty refunds each day. Without doubt, this massively increases to around 700 during end-of-year. Consequently, this means processing these refunds can be a whole day’s work.
The process starts with the school emailing the caterer with the refund request. If you receive incorrect details from the school, the wrong amount, or wrong person could be refunded. This happened a few times, and the caterer had to absorb the loss.
Following the process of each refund, the caterer then had to email both the school and parent to notify them that they had actioned the refund. The whole process was just so time-consuming.
How we helped
We regularly undertake customer research, upon discovering the length of time refunds took to process, we developed our catering refund portal.
The system lists all the transactions to refund, allowing the Impact Food team to approve or decline all refunds, safe in the knowledge that it is impossible to refund a negative amount. The system will only refund what is in the refundable amount.
Parents can request refunds directly, taking the school completely out of the equation.
There is a full audit trail, and automated confirmation emails are sent to parents.
The result
Refunds are now done in seconds. With just a few clicks, and the automated emails save a huge amount of time.
I couldn’t believe it the first time I just clicked a button, and it said completed!
