In recent times, no other management buzzword has had as much hype as “The Cloud”, but what is it exactly and why does it generate such excitement.

I like to describe the cloud as “the notion of data, applications and hardware sources being accessed remotely”. For those of you who are thinking that this is nothing new, you are absolutely right. Many of us have been enjoying some form of cloud computing with Google, Hotmail, Amazon and the like for the last 10 or 15 years.

The Economist recently suggested that, 20 years ago, 80% of the information we needed to do our jobs came from within the organisation we worked for. Now we have high speed IT infrastructure, greater storage capability and knowledge freely available all over the internet, more and more of the things we do each day can be done outside the organisation through “The Cloud” rather than using the PC on our desk.

What this means for us is that IT has now developed to a point where we can increasingly do away with PC’s and on site IT Systems and access information and processes in real time from any device with access to the internet. This gives us all the advantages of computing processes and systems without the need for a traditional desktop PC.

A good historical parallel is electricity. It isn’t that long ago that if a business needed power, they had to generate it themselves on site. Now electricity is delivered to us through a network where we probably know who our provider is but we do not necessarily know where the electricity was actually generated.

So why all the hype? I have thought long and hard about this one and have come to the conclusion that we have reached a “Tipping Point”. As more people enjoy the benefits of new cloud services such as smartphone applications and centralised data sharing, they understand that the next generation of business IT investments will begin to exploit this technology for better and more efficient processes and customer services.

In my opinion, the hype is truly justified because when used in the right way with the right security, “Cloud Computing” can change fundamentally the way our services are delivered. The right information exactly when and where we need it at a fraction of the cost is a clear demonstration that through “The Cloud” we can achieve more for less.

Andy Heys

We know the commercial sector has widely used shared service models for the last fifteen years to increase standardisation and enhance efficiency by up to 30%, so the ideas and solutions are not new. So why is it that Local Government has been slow to adopt this approach and realise the benefits?

In this paper, Andy Heys, Founder of Enhance Management Consulting and a frequent public speaker on managing change, will draw on his experience as a Shared Service Interim Manager and Consultant in both the private and public sectors, to explore some of the issues which are holding Local Government back and ways to unblock them.

This paper won’t make you an expert in the few minutes it takes to read, but it will help you to think and gain an insight into some of the issues surrounding Local Government shared services.

Reviewing the options
In the current economic climate where significant savings need to be made, it is now generally accepted that sharing services is part of the solution. Whether to share or not is no longer the question you should be asking. Instead, you should be asking: How should I share and how does my choice align with my overall sourcing strategy?

People have been arguing for years about the relative merits of outsourcing versus shared services. One of the reasons Local Government has been slow to share is that their options are far more complicated than these two simple models may suggest. The table below demonstrates just some of the sourcing options Local Authorities can follow from full outsourcing to simple in house centralisation of shared services.

Local Government Sourcing Options:

Which approach makes more sense? This is a simple question I am often asked by clients and any answer would need to take into account dimensions like: Size; Location; Internal capability; Partner capability; Scale and scope; Stakeholder appetite for risk; Track record; Current process effectiveness; Relative performance of processes; and, Service quality to make any sensible business case.

Outsourcing can provide greater flexibility by turning fixed costs into variable costs, but this may come at the expense of transparency and control, often important to Members. The right partner can provide you with world class processes and controls which can present even less risk than your own, the wrong partner will exploit your lack of experience in contract management and will maximise their profits through the change control process.

The Shared Service approach makes sense when control is a priority and the activities are unique to an organisation. Success will be reliant on having adequate systems, processes, talent and scale. If these do not compare with what a third party vendor has on offer, it will be difficult for the internal shared services team to be competitive.

Is there a middle way? An increasing number of authorities are now exploring the possibility of Joint Ventures through either collaborative agreements or separate entity companies - with an outsourcing vendor or another Authority. These are set up as independent companies to act as a service provider but with the benefit of financial ownership and control. Of course there could be a huge upside to these arrangements but there are also commercial risks that some authorities (and Members) are unwilling or unable to take. To survive, these new organisations will have to focus acutely on value and service as commodity services can more easily be provided by a third party.

Choosing between outsourcing and shared services does not have to be an either / or decision however. Many organisations are best served by mixing a combination of outsourcing and shared services even within a single business function.

Getting the sourcing strategy right is clearly a complex area and success will be achieved by those organisations who: choose the right options; make fewer mistakes; and, govern the change process effectively.

Establishing good governance
In my experience, the most common reason outsourcing deals and shared service transformations fail to deliver expected benefits is because of poor governance. And, good governance starts the moment you start thinking about your sourcing options.

A lot has been written about governance of Boards and Joint Committees and I expect these structures and systems to be part of any of the above Shared Service / Outsourcing governance models. In my experience it is the poor governance of the implementation programme which is more often than not the root cause of the failure to realise benefits.

Good Governance starts from the point you start talking about your options to the point where the project is closed and benefits have been realised and lessons have been learned. The best organisations stick to their governance principles throughout the life cycle of any programme of change. I have set out my example of high level governance principles below:

Governance Principles:

Governance check-list:
Governance is more often than not just good common sense and attention to detail. Some may consider the following check-list ‘motherhood and apple pie’, however, experience shows that knowing what you are supposed to do is not enough. It is the tenacious attention to actioning this type of detail that will ensure your project delivers the benefits you expected at the outset.

• A compelling business case, stating the objects and specifying the scope
• A mechanism to assess the compliance with original objectives and delivery of business benefits
• Identification of all stakeholders with an interest in the project
• A defined method of communication to each stakeholder
• An agreed set of business-level requirements and specification for the project deliverables
• The appointment of a project manager
• The clear assignment of project roles and responsibilities
• A current, comprehensive and published project plan
• A system of accurate status and progress reporting
• A central document repository for the project
• A process for the management and resolution of project issues
• A process for the recording and communication of project risks
• A system to identify, assess and agree project changes
• A standard for quality review of the key governance documents and project deliverables
• A governance meetings framework
• Governance training for key governance officers / board members

Changing the culture
When I first began to deliver assignments into Local Government I was told that I would struggle to achieve the type of benefits that I had been used to in the private sector. They told me the staff were low skilled and unmotivated. In contrast, I have found staff to be highly skilled just lacking in confidence to make a sound business case and do the right thing. In the right circumstances and with the right leader, I have demonstrated that they can be motivated to achieve amazing successes. My experience suggests that motivating change in the Public Sector is more about the persuasive ability of the leadership to change the culture. This is an important observation for those choosing future leaders.

In the case of Local Government Shared Services, because of the focus on reducing costs, the culture needs to be obsessively client focussed. My simple line with the teams I have led has been: “Be professional. You are not the gatekeeper any-more, you have to give the customer all the costed options and in the end, let them decide”. I’m not saying that staff in Local Government have been doing the wrong thing for years, more that with a change to a cost and service focussed delivery, where there is clear competition from the private sector, the mindset just has to change to deliver more value and a better experience.

During any transformational change, there will be people who forget the past and focus on the future, I like to call these “The Visionaries”. There will be the ones who just keep their heads down, “The Troops”, and there will be those whom every point of reference or comparison is from the past, “The Historians”. There are no simple rules for dealing with these different types of individuals, and by the way, people can jump from one group to another in an instant as environmental changes allow the organisational DNA to express itself in new ways.

How do we deal with a fast moving, paradigm shifting environment which throws up these types of people issues? I have two suggestions drawn from my experience of complex transformations. First, employ a leader who has the ability to develop a clear vision of the future and is able to communicate this effectively to a team. This individual will then seek out patterns of behaviour and connections that others do not, repairing them on the way and by unblocking, empowering and encouraging action. This kind of leader will link functions, people and processes to get the right things done faster.

Putting the right change manager into position is a difficult task and indeed a whole industry has built up to do exactly this. Of course I am bound to say that a very good Interim Manager who has the experience of delivering change may, is likely with hindsight, be a sound investment.

Finally, don’t let the grass grow under your feet. Delays in projects are the same as delays in realising benefits. If your cultural engineering efforts aren’t working and you can’t change the people, change the people and do it fast or you won’t realise the benefits you anticipated.

Realising the benefits
Managing a shared service transformation project well and handing the new team over to the business are key elements of managing a complex programme. But in the current economic climate, what your boss really cares about are the benefits, which is why an actively managed benefits realisation process is essential to any complex transformation programme.

The reason the benefits realisation process must be managed is that project benefits are the result of changes in business processes that are enabled by the project or technology, but often exist in the business and are independent of the management or control of the programme manager. Those realising benefits need to see this bigger picture and need to be able to influence change in processes, behaviours and performance management outside their scope to effectively realise the benefits of their programme of work.

For this reason it is important to consider benefits realisation from the project outset building key benefits realisation principles and activities into the programme from the start. Consider the following steps:

· Identify and value potential benefits (base-line performance)

· Assign responsibility for planning and realising benefits

· Analyse business processes and identify business drivers

· Determine business events that lead to benefits (e.g. redundancy)

· Include business events as milestones in the project

· Establish metrics to realise benefits after the project has closed

· Monitor and review

Those organisations who adopt a benefits realisation process and learn the language of benefits will find that they tenaciously drive benefits out and will have more success in delivering and communicating the benefits of their change programmes.

The Future
Following my review of the sourcing models on behalf of clients, my belief is the one which balances control, transparency, independent hosting and the upside of potential future profits is a 100% Local Government owned joint venture. For those Authorities prepared to accept the legal risks around Teckal companies and prepared to buy in the appropriate commercial service delivery expertise, this model could lead to significant benefits for them and could change in the landscape of local government and the outsourcing sector.

My prediction is that in over the next 10 years, a number of the currently small Local Government owned service providers will begin to merge to form companies to rival and potentially take on established outsourcers. We will see them grow through acquisition, merger and by simply winning more contracts. In the later part of the time-frame as the owners execute their exit strategies, we will see these organisations listed and sold realising enormous windfalls for the Authorities who had the foresight and appetite for risk to set them up and to hold out for the right sale price.

That said, those organisations who align their sourcing strategy and simultaneously adopt the principles of good governance, culture change and benefits realisation will find they succeed whatever they do because the right culture and the right processes will deliver.

The scene is therefore set. Those who move fast and get the right advice and help will prosper. Those who don’t move fast to implement the right sourcing solutions will find in 12 to 18 months that they have not delivered and they are in a distressed position where they will be forced into a sourcing option which does not align to their organisational goals.

To find out more about how Andy Heys can work with your team to develop your sourcing strategy or set up your very own shared service, contact him at: info@enhanceconsulting.com

Socitm 2010, Tomorrow’s Public Services Today

conference

He explained that operational savings of 30% could be achieved  by sharing services across the public sector. However, managing the power struggles between merging local authorities is likely to be one of the biggest headaches for managers of the process. He also explained that, embarking on a programme of baseline performance and benchmarking is “critical” to any local authority looking to tap into Shared Services and demonstrate the benefits.

These key points have been picked up quickly by the technology press, see the links below for more information:

http://www.onenewspage.co.uk/news/Computer+Industry/20101012/15916935/Power-struggles-are-headache-when-sharing-local.htm

http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/local-gov/socitm2010-benchmarking-critical-shared-services

http://www.socitm2010.net/2010/10/12/challenges-of-a-shared-future/

If you are interested in downloading a copy of our presentation, you can find the link below.

http://www.slideshare.net/socitm/geoff-connell-lb-newham-shared-services

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Andy Heys, founder of Enhance Consulting has created a new breed of book to support his consulting engagements. His card deck format strives to provide information to an audience increasingly used to consuming content on the internet and cell phones. As many people no longer have the time to read a book, particularly a business book cover to cover, his flashcard approach appeals to time starved managers looking to dip in and out when they have the time.

His first publication is, “Influencing Change in Organisations”. This amazing pack of cards brings readers the very best communication and persuasion techniques from the science of influence, sports psychology, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), cognitive therapy and good old fashioned common sense.

The techniques are presented in a convenient deck of cards allowing readers to read, review and easily practice to improve performance, communication and influence change.

These cards are not for general sale. They are exclusively available when you engage Enhance Consulting to provide training or consultancy services for your organisation.

With a focus on topics aimed at inspiring personal, professional and financial success, Andy is currently developing further decks. His mission is to provide must-have content in an easy to use format to support his consulting and training engagements.

To arrange training sessions or consulting engagements with us, please contact us using our contact form.

Testimonials

“Practical and insightful, I decided to engage Enhance Consulting to provide training and influence cards for all of my Management team” – Liz Brown, Customer Services Manager

“Self improvement books usually pad out a couple of interesting ideas, but the number of practical tips in this deck is remarkable” – Don McClure, Serial Entrepreneur

“Powerful and concise. An innovative approach to influencing organisational change” – Dave Edward, Change Consultant

To arrange training sessions or consulting engagements with us, please contact us using our contact form.

Downturns can cause and hide deep structural changes that will have longer term implications than a simple cyclical correction. In this current downturn, the realignments in global financial markets, credit availability, new regulation and relative costs will have significant long term implications for business. Money will be made and lost, but more fundamentally we will see the demise of some industries and the emergence of new ones. Which these will be is difficult to predict, but we can be certain that the way we do business will be significantly different when we come out of the recession than coming in. Those organisations who maintain strategic flexibility are likely to be the ones who exit this downturn in the best position.

In a recession, management needs to balance immediate market challenges with longer term strategic needs. To do this and maintain strategic flexibility requires management to focus on several key areas at once.

Costs
For the majority of businesses it is inevitable that they will have to cut costs to work their way through a recession. However strategists need to be careful about the basis upon which these cuts are made. It will be crucial to identify those costs which are least important in delivering what key customers really value. To enable this insight, business need to develop a deep understanding of what their profitable customers need and value and at the same time analyse which internal processes deliver this and cut those that don’t. This type of exercise is not a quick fix in identifying unnecessary costs. It should be a regular activity which identifies those activities which deliver competitive advantage for the business whilst ensuring that cost cutting does not harm the longer term business potential.

Strategy
During a recession, events happen quickly and are often unpredictable. Because of this, strategy during a downturn is about maintaining flexibility, planning for the future and dealing with unpredicted events. This is particularly important when considering major transactions or changes for the business such as, mergers, acquisition, capital investment or redundancies for example. In these cases, more flexibility may be provided through strategic alliances, partnerships and leasing options.

Financials
Organisations with good financial governance will be focusing even more on cash flow. This will require working capital to be kept under control, ensuring that major transactions add to the creation of value for customers. For many businesses, this is a time to look in detail at where their profit actually comes from. Typically businesses find that 80% of profit comes from 20% of products and customers. This means that some customers and products actually damage profitability, for pure survival reasons it may be appropriate to cut these products and customers.

Talent
Downturns are a time of great change and great opportunity. For this reason, the best managers will be mobile. For many companies who are downsizing and trying to get more out of their staff, retaining and nurturing their best managers will be a challenge. As management development budgets are slashed, talent development may have to come in house and focus on key managers. Senior managers will have to develop their own capabilities to coach and mentor these individuals. This means that Human Resources support of the most senior people is one area that should not be cut during a recession.

The Bottom Line
Managing strategy in a recession is a crucial balancing act, identifying short term cost savings whilst maximising long-term competitive advantage. Not all organisations will make the right choices, getting the right advice can often be the difference between success and failure.

To find out more about how Enhance Management Consulting can work with your senior team to develop your strategy and manage this complex balancing act, contact us through our contact form.

The recent downturn has sent many directors into a frenzy of activity to understand where they can cut costs, particularly in the Public Sector. The results have seen many of our clients speed up the drive towards streamlining processes, sharing services, adopting best practices; and making effective strategic supply chain decisions.

Our research has highlighted that for many organisations, the supply chain can pose significant strategic and operational risk and that all business areas need a clearer picture of supplier performance and the behaviours that influence it. Moreover, organisations struggle to make the right strategic decisions and realise efficiencies without well governed supply chain processes and effective performance feedback.

About Us

We are an innovative Company with a team of risk and sourcing specialists who understand that the true value of sourcing and supplier management lies in delivering the benefits from supplier contracts and partnerships. We have developed an innovative approach to strategic supply chain management that will help you deliver Best Value from your supply chain and assist you in improving or maintaining your regulatory (CAA) performance.

Our Approach

We have invested heavily in developing a new web based process management tool that:

1. Provides a portfolio view of all suppliers at all levels with consistent performance MI and the ability to directly compare across deals
2. Allows for more informed decision making with the overall goal of highlighting areas where organisations can achieve Best Value, balanced with a clear understanding of the relevant risks
3. Helps identify strategic suppliers (these are not always based on cost) and highlights costs, potential risks and dependencies
4. Highlights potential performance gaps and opportunities for efficiency improvements
5. Provides a mechanism to up-skill your people i.e. skills gap analysis, training and knowledge transfer
6. Easily integrates with existing governance, processes, systems and supply chain documentation
7. Links directly with the IPC joint commissioning model and provides the real engine for change

The ‘buy side’ of the Procurement process is traditionally a more mature ‘managed’ process. However, the ongoing supplier relationship, service performance and governance, especially around risk, are, less robust and our new tool can add significant value in this space. It can also help you to demonstrate CAA and other regulatory compliance, especially in the areas of resource utilisation and working with partners.

Our belief is that managing suppliers and supply chains is a core skill that all organisations should have, particularly if they are aiming to achieve cost efficiencies whilst balancing service delivery and risks.

We focus on, working with your people and building and consolidating key skills in your organisation by raising internal competency and identifying areas where your processes can be improved to enhance the service you provide.

To book a 30 minute appointment with us to talk through this in a little more detail and let you see the benefits this approach may bring, contact us using our contact form.

Many thanks and we look forward to meeting you.

Your executive team may have business school MBA’s but ask yourself this question: Is there ever anything on the curriculum about how to maximise value and effectively manage external advisors and business consultants?  We believe that a little inside information on how the consulting industry operates will enable you to extract much more value from the consultants you engage and therefore more effectively target your expenditure.  

I would like to share with you an insightful service we are delivering for our clients which will help you in this regard. If you can answer ‘Yes’ to the following questions you are likely to find our service beneficial.

1. Do you use business advisors, management consultants and contractors?

2. Do you sometimes wonder if you are getting the best advice and value from them?

3. Would you like to know about the techniques they use to get you to buy their services?

4. Would you like your team to be trained in effective use of management consultants, advisors or contractors?

5. Are you keen to find out how quickly and easily your organisation could get access to these insights?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to these questions, like many of our clients, you may be interested in our, ‘How to use Management Consultants Effectively’ Seminar.

This ½ day seminar is run by our founder, Andy Heys. Andy is uniquely positioned to provide advice on this topic. Over the last 20 years, Andy has spent 10 years buying consulting services and 10 years delivering them.  He has worked around the world for the ‘Big 4′, a leading Strategy Consulting firm and since 2008 has been running his own firm, Enhance Management Consulting.

There is little doubt that calling on management consultants can often prove to be a valuable investment, providing the client knows how to manage them effectively.

In this unique workshop, delegates will find out when to use consultants and how to get the best out of them. Here is a taster for some of the areas the session covers:

1. Involve Senior Management at the start, their involvement is crucial in implementing any recommendations
2. Be very clear on the reason why you want to use a consultant or advisor rather than do the work yourselves
3. Define clearly the project scope, deliverables and benefits or the project will drag on and will not deliver  
4. Understand the different types of consultants that are available and be clear what you need  
5. Prepare a shortlist of potential organisations and request the submission of proposals
6. Govern the delivery through regular progress reports and measure actual progress against agreed objectives
7. Develop the final recommendations together so they are about your organisation not the next opportunity or sale
8. Be clear if they are to write a report as the main output or if they should deliver a series of presentations
9. Review the original proposal and make sure they have delivered what they promised
10. Hold a full debrief  and don’t let them leave before the knowledge has been transferred to your satisfaction

Andy will finish the day with a discussion on the future of consulting and how you and your teams can learn to make the industry work for you.

We deliver an interactive ½ day seminar for up to 12 delegates to be run on your premises. This session also includes a user manual for each delegate.  To find out more and book now before these sessions sell out, contact us online at info@enhanceconsulting.com

We look forward to talking to you when you contact us.

Introduction
Demand for more locations, more channels and more complex services leave many Customer Service Directors with a ‘complexity headache’, struggling to understand how to cut through the chaos and steer a clear path to a successful future. Managing a high degree of complexity is particularly difficult for leaders of small to medium sized centres where business cases relating to system integration, modernisation and simplification often do not stack up and past experience with software vendors offering the world have left them with a very cautious attitude to change.

In this paper, Andy Heys from Enhance Management Consulting explores common client issues around complexity. He shows how some clever thinking and advancements in software integration technology can help to address this complexity and deliver consistent quality services across multiple channels for a fraction of the cost you anticipated.

Do you recognise some of these common issues?
The challenges around managing complex environments are common amongst the Directors we work with. See how much you can relate to the issues set out below:

The Complexity Challenge
“Our contact centre acts as a single point of contact for a multitude of separate products and services. We use up to 25 different IT systems, most of which have not been designed for use in a call centre environment. We also have what we call a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system which is in reality a simple database. This knowledge base is static, requiring agents to request and read information during the call rather than being taken through the process and served information and prompts as with a case based reasoning and an integrated CRM.”

“The knowledge base also logs the contact resolution code and some basic information about the call. Increasingly the organisation understands the value this type of data can provide and is starting to ask for more and better information for marketing and performance purposes. Legacy databases and systems which don’t follow the call process and don’t include data entry controls abound. This situation leads to errors, longer call times and longer wrap, frustrating the agents and degrading customer service.” What is worse is that this means we are not collecting information on key interactions with our customers and are missing opportunities to respond to customer needs.

“Our systems and processes are complex and we think we should be able to get a grip of them, it just seems like it will require a big investment to do it right. We are also aware that it is often the third attempt at implementing CRM that is the successful on and understandably, we are frightened of not getting it right”

The Customer Relationship Management Challenge
“We know the CRM is not fit for purpose, the processes are becoming more complex for our agents and we are at the limit of what we can train and they can hold in their heads. We could split the contact centre into smaller teams each focusing on a small set of products and services, but this will surely reduce service levels. The training department in the customer service centre is under extreme pressure to keep up, what with the level of staff turnover. We recognise and support the concept of a 360° customer view, but we have no roadmap to achieve this.”

The Channel Challenge
“Telephony, e-mail and white mail channels are operated through our contact centre. Web channels are somewhat behind in terms of the thinking and understanding what technology and information would support simple and user-friendly self-service. A common, process-based system which can drive all our channels consistently and compatibly would be hugely beneficial. Other channels such as face-to-face sales, branches and partnership sites also use the CRM as a knowledge base, but this is only serving to increase the training requirement for these users and our training team.”

The Back Office Rationalisation Challenge
“Rationalisation of the back offices within the organisation is high on the agenda. There are many fragmented legacy systems in use and performance measurement often requires labour intensive manual systems to be put in place. Increasingly there is a requirement for the back offices to work together with our partners to align services and processes that cut across organisational and system boundaries. A common platform to enable workflow around these systems and processes and a similar culture to the way our Customer Service Centre operates would be highly beneficial.”

The IT Challenge
“Inevitably, there are some individuals within the IT department that have thought about these issues and more, but they are not engaging with the business to help us develop our vision for the future. This is driven by a conservative attitude originating out of a history of previous poor experiences with CRM development. There is also a very strong desire to develop solutions ‘in-house’, perhaps as a direct result of poor delivery by previous vendors. However, there is a large element of dissatisfaction from business management with the current technology solutions in place and the speed at which changes can be delivered. Given all this, one of the key issues within the IT department is the availability of application development resources to keep pace with the business’s demands; this slows down our creativity and potential for the future.”

Did You Recognise Yourself?
Multiple and disparate applications, ineffective CRM solutions, and poor management information is an unfortunate but all too common situation. Sadly, many Customer Service Directors will empathise with at least some of these challenges. The problem is that as the business and the contact centre changes, the underpinning systems and applications increasingly don’t or can’t and feel the strain. The consequence is that the contact centre’s work and its ability to satisfy increasingly demanding customers in an ever more competitive world are being constrained by the creaking technology.

Despite budgetary pressures, sooner or later the organisation is faced with biting the bullet and either replacing the whole application portfolio or undertaking a massive integration project. Neither of these options is palatable and the received wisdom is that both require significant and possibly unacceptable costs, not to mention time required to implement and risks to the business. The smaller the contact centre, the higher these relative costs and risks are perceived.

A Solution!
Fortunately, as a result of recent innovations, technology now has a better solution to offer us. This new technology uses straight forward non-invasive front-end or surface integration techniques to provide agents with access to all their systems via a unified desktop, removing the need to jump between systems, copy and paste data from one field to another and cross-reference information from different applications.

The key to this technology is that the process design facility is under the control of the business, the dependence on scarce IT resources to alter and update processes is removed. In this way, agents can be presented with a unified desktop and 360° customer view with timely and accurate information at exactly the right point in the procedure drawn from any one of the underlying legacy business applications.

This moves a static knowledge management system from one that stores procedures to one which captures expertise on products, services and customers and feeds this information intelligently to agents via the integrated process management system at the right time during a customer transaction.

This is the next generation of knowledge management and customer relationship systems which will drive the future of our contact centres and increasingly will grow to support back offices by fully integrating the end to end work-flow in our organisations.

With automated procedures in place for key tasks and transactions across all channels, other desirable benefits can be achieved. Management information on the procedure path can be automatically extracted, for instance to find out how many times and why a customer cancelled a policy or was unable to buy their first choice product. This is far more effective than the use of call close / resolution codes or inconsistent agent wrap notes and could facilitate on the fly analysis and changes to processes which are then instantly deployed across all channels.

Feedback from the use of automated procedures is the key to optimisation. Elements of the procedure that are inefficient, unused or in the wrong sequence can be quickly identified and the whole process made successively more efficient within a short period of time. There’s less need to rely on quality control mechanisms such as call monitoring and side by side coaching, instead the automation of the procedures ensures they are consistently followed.

One of the things you are going to love about this technology is that if you have your processes and procedures documented you have already done most of the work. Development of the system is a matter of mapping procedural text and system links to the process flows which can be rolled out as an emergent strategy rather than a big risky project and big bang launch.

Of course, it’s not just about technology, the processes and the people are both aspects that are crucial to delivering real and lasting change. However, in this case we see the technology as unlocking the changes in both the culture and the processes.

A Better Customer Experience
This next generation of technology improves the customer experience, providing consistent service delivery in multiple locations through multiple channels. No longer do customers have to repeat information to several people with unpredictable levels of quality and consistency. The quality of service customers receive becomes much less dependent on which agent they are routed to and more on the quality of the process which of course, the Customer Service Director can directly control.

By marrying together non-invasive integration, process automation and the unified desktop, the business is empowered to take back control of business processes - the net effect is a reduction in cost, consistent and auditable use of lean procedures, higher first contact resolution rate and an improved customer experience.

The icing on the cake is that with more flexible integration techniques, legacy systems no longer need to be replaced, all these benefits can therefore be achieved at lower levels of risk to the business, for a far less significant outlay, and a return on investment measured in months rather than years.

Performance Review
Every situation is different and I would not suggest that you go forward with any changes until you have had a comprehensive review of your circumstances. This will determine, your current performance baseline, how you compare with your peers and the most sensible next steps, aligning your goals with the complexities of your processes, your people and the opportunities afforded by new technology.

Enhance Management Consulting can quickly and efficiently carry out this review for you and your organisation. Our performance reviews draw on a model of Customer Service leading performance and practice which we have built up over several years. We will examine the performance of your organisation and compare it with our leading practice model to identify improvement opportunities. We will then work with your teams to identify and prioritise the most sensible and practical options and then develop a comprehensive change plan to support you through implementation.

Contact our sales director for an informal discussion
Could this be the medicine to soothe your ‘complexity headache’? We think so.

For more information and to arrange an informal discussion about your issues and requirements contact our sales team through our contact form.