The volume of applications we get is in the thousands. You know, and it's people in all different stages of hardship, from people who are behind on their utility bills but okay with their rent to people who are in eviction court but are okay with their utilities to people who need everything. My name is Kate Haisley. My job is to process applications from people seeking help with rent and utilities based on their COVID hardships.
There's basically five qualifiers, illness, job loss, reduction of income, if you're self-employed and your business has been affected, and then the last is child care. The application itself was, you know, it was a digital application, but it's seven pages long, right? DreamKey had to translate those guidelines into what they needed to see on the screen. When someone applies online, they're actually, the information gets put into a Salesforce application. That application is then assigned to someone in my position, and we're able to go into it. Salesforce provides these cloud tools where we don't have to wait around for servers to be spun up somewhere. Like that day, we were able to get started. You know, that cuts down days, sometimes weeks.
Then there's a second page, which is more address, utility bills, rent, where all of those figures get put in. Then there's a third section, which is an awards section, which is where you actually put in how much money you're going to be able to award to that person for their electricity, their gas, their water. That data is available immediately to everyone, right, that's interacting with that applicant. So they could see maybe where the applicant's stuck and needs a little help to fill out a section, or the application's done and now they need to review it, to process it. All that can be done seamlessly from wherever we were.
Having a database that allowed us to compile all of the documents that a customer may have sent over, and then all you have to do is just click on the button and it pops up. You can actually formulate it to make a file so that it's nice and pretty for an auditor was a game changer for us. When we hit the deadline, I think within a few weeks we had the application up and running for people to use. If you think about trying to do what we do with the U.S. Post Office, it wouldn't happen. I mean, there's no way you could get someone from a position where, say, they're a week out from a court date, or worse, a week out from lockout. If we didn't have Salesforce and the ability to react quickly, we wouldn't be able to help people. It is a crazy good success. The light is at the end of the tunnel because we have the systems in place that just make our job easier from day to day. Working with PS just helped streamline our flows and our processes to offer our customer a better experience. It isn't buying software. It isn't, you know, saying yes, which is all my job was, just to say yes, go ahead and try this. The truth is, it was the people. It was the staff members who were behind it who said, we're going to implement this system, we're going to get it up and running, and then they did. And that was just the most amazing part of that.