Saturday, November 24, 2018

Childcare management service provider Hubworks! shows us how not to deliver SaaS platform

Late this year, the Department of Education and Training required daycare services including Family Daycare services to transition to a fully-eletronic "Child Care Subsidy System" (CCSS). They supply a list of vetted and approved third party software providers to mediate between DET's CCSS and the FDC provider.

Which brings me to "Hubworks!" This company produces a hosted SaaS that amongst other things caters to family daycare services. You will be shocked to hear that this blog is not a ringing endorsement of their wonderful platform.

They managed to:

  • Produce the worst online enrolment form I have ever seen, and I've seen some truly bad web forms;
  • Have their support service ask my partner to send them her password;
  • Write me off as a parent, because there's only one "Primary Parent";
  • Trumpet on their website about all their amazing Web Based Web 2.0 with Bank Level Security while doing all this.

I reached out to Hubworks via support and internal channels months ago to raise some of these issues. I have been ignored and dismissed. My ticket has been marked "Fixed". So it's time to see if their marketing department cares more.

They've been very happy to direct me to seek support via the educator and the family daycare scheme, as "[t]his is policy of HubWorks! that we always direct parents back to the service as we do not provide assistance to families." From my experience so far, they also do not provide any assistance to the service or educators.