NDIS Service Provider Rating Site Expands to NSW

Social enterprise Clickability, Australia’s first online platform to rate and review National Disability Insurance Scheme service providers, is expanding to New South Wales.

Clickability, which has been described as a TripAdvisor for the NDIS, will launch in NSW on 1 March with the aim of helping people with disability choose and purchase the services they need.

The social enterprise was founded by two social workers, Aviva Beecher Kelk and Jenna Moffat, concerned about the lack of information on NDIS services.

“A big part of my role was to help people link into the services that they needed,” Beecher Kelk said.

“Essentially, I was gatekeeping a lot of information, which didn’t sit well with me.

“It was really disempowering and highly impractical for the people I was supporting. In the NDIS world, people would be making their own decisions, so it was something we wanted to help make happen.”

She said, with the NDIS creating a marketplace, open information was essential.

“Other industries, such as travel or hospitality, use customer reviews or peer-generated reviews,” she said.

“This was missing in the disability industry.”

Clickability was first launched in Victoria a year ago, following a pilot program in Geelong.

Beecher Kelk told Pro Bono News expanding into NSW was the natural next step for the enterprise, which has been growing in staff and volunteer numbers, and industry partners.

“We’ve had a lot of interest from New South Wales-based organisations and consumers, a lot of people say: ‘When are you coming to New South Wales?’” she said.

“We’ve heard that multiple times a week for 12 months so that’s where the interest is and where the community’s most ready for it.

“Some of the service providers we have listed also go interstate, and a lot of them are delivering services both in Victoria and New South Wales.

“It’s really important to see how the industry’s developing similarly and differently as well because there’s quite different culture across states and a different status quo about what happens and how it happens. So it’s great to have that comparison.”

Along with delivering its core service, she said Clickability provided insights into the Victorian NDIS market.

“We’ve been really happy that so many of the Victorian service providers listed on our site have subscribed and 65 per cent of Victorian listings now have reviews on them, so that’s really exciting,” she said.

“And we’re doing our second thematic analysis at the moment of all the reviews, and we’re continuously finding subtleties in what’s coming through and a lot of stuff about how important outcomes are to consumers and especially to carers.

“Customer service has been a really important thing that keeps coming up and how service providers that have really great internal processes have really happy customers. We don’t feel surprised by those things, and it’s really lovely to be able to demonstrate that in this industry.”

Beecher Kelk said the aim was to have Clickability live Australia wide in five years.

“Our vision is to be across all of Australia because hopefully the NDIS is going to mean a lot more flexibility for people and that traveling won’t be a big deal and moving across states won’t be a big deal, and part of that is having the right information,” she said.

“I suspect ACT will be next and we’ll have to see what happens after that.”