How Case Management Automation Can Improve Your Organization’s Investigative Process

A recent Case IQ poll found that 100% of investigators consider case management automation an important or extremely important priority for 2024. But why is this suddenly a trend? Because:

• 60% of investigators think their teams spend too much time on administrative/manual tasks, and
• Only 17% feel that their organization’s investigative program is “mature”

Are your investigative processes as efficient as they could be? If you want to save your team’s precious investigation time by reducing administrative tasks, you need to automate your case management with software like Case IQ.

Why Automate Steps in the Investigative Workflow?

You might be thinking, “how can you automate this?” For a lot of investigative activities, such as interviewing or analyzing evidence, it takes human interaction to get to the bottom of what happened. Case management automation allows investigators to kickstart and focus on those and other things that are truly investigative and less on more administrative tasks, such as assigning cases and managing deadlines.

Streamlined Workflows

Investigators often spend hours of their days determining the next steps for their cases, communicating with teammates via email and searching for supporting documents. However, with Case IQ, all of those tasks can be automated and completed right in the platform, giving back time better spent on investigative work.

Using case management software automation, you can assign cases based on the next available investigator or other parameters of your choice. For example, you might set your system to assign a task to an investigative team member who has a certain area of subject matter expertise or who you know has worked on a related case.

Also, if you have an approval process for cases, you can have that completely built into your application. Administrators can later modify and adjust these workflow rules as your team learns and grows. When you don’t have to tackle as many administrative tasks, you can just focus on the work at hand, decreasing resolution time.

Less Guesswork

If you don’t have a solution like Case IQ in place, you’re leaving your investigators to plan for themselves. As a result, they might not know their deadlines or what to do in order to move a case forward. This can lead to a flurry of emails back-and-forth to sort out the process, or to investigations falling through the cracks altogether.

In other words, you’re relying on a lot of assumptions. This includes assumptions that your team knows the investigative process, assumptions that everyone knows how to triage and prioritize cases the same way and assumptions about your team’s work capacity.

With case management automation, though, everyone on the team is on the same page. Investigators get notifications when they have a deadline coming up. Managers can see the status of each case to identify sticking points. Most importantly, cases move onto the next step or status automatically after the last task is complete, so there’s no confusion on process.

Improved Consistency and Data Integrity

Inconsistency in case management comes with a multitude of risks. First, it wastes time, as each investigator has to come up with a new process from scratch, even if you’ve resolved similar cases before. Second, team members, especially those with large caseloads, might forget about a stage or step of the investigative process.

Your organization could also face an employee lawsuit if two similar cases yielded two different outcomes. In addition, sloppy data management increases your risk of lost or stolen information. Lastly, failing to address some incident types (such as a workplace injury or data breach) can result in non-compliance fines and penalties.

With Case IQ, you can select mandatory fields or specific validation that must be added into a case before it can progress to the next stage. This ensures consistency of process and data integrity, as every case goes through the same steps in the same order.

Having a defined process and being able to guide investigators through the process instead of them treating cases the way that they think best helps your team focus on the things that matter. Case management automation is as much about risk mitigation as it is about benefits to your team’s efficiency.