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The Client project was already under way to design the build of a new Contact Centre to support the release of a new product.
To support the project a mixed internal/external project team had been assembled to design and manage the implementation of the Contact Centre. Having been assembled and working for 18 months, the project team had focused on fulfilling the operational brief through mapping the current sales and fulfilment processes and had begun to look at defining the new processes.
The transactional element of the Contact Centre systems build had been defined externally to the project team by group IT and was to include the standard company product (with modifications) for the new offering and a web enabled/eCommerce front end for customer self-serve and registration. The telephony was through expansion of the current telephony platform.
The project team had selected Siebel for Contact Centre functionality/customer history as the implementation of Siebel had begun elsewhere in The Group.
Relationship with Group IT was very much parent/child with extremely limited influence from The Project to Group IT... A Siebel deployment specialist had recently joined the team and was focusing on mapping the new processes onto vanilla Siebel through working within the project team.
Due to a combination of factors including limited time left before launch (6 months), non-interactive relationship between project team and Group IT and the overall approach of the current team, Group IT were not planning to deliver any automated data transfer between "their" systems and the Contact Centre Siebel application, therefore compelling the manual transposition of customer details from the transactional systems into Siebel.
At this point of impasse, through recommendation, the project manager invited Little Blue to join and complement the team on a flexible basis, to improve the relationship with Group IT and to get some form of automated information update designed and delivered.
Following initial analysis of the team and the current situation, it became apparent that the current stand-off had come about through a number of key factors;
A gradual perception had built-up in Group IT of the project team as a non-technical "user" group who had not met requirement delivery deadlines and therefore no longer had the credibility to influence the design of technical solutions.
The technical management of the project team had a strong telephony background but was unable to challenge or influence Group IT on data/application issues
There was a lack of joined-up thinking within the team regarding actual requirements and the automated interface had not been bottomed-out to a clear specification.
Having presented and gained positive feedback from the project manager of the initial findings, Little Blue deployed a senior technical consultant with both practical "design and build" and proven sales/"tact and diplomacy" skills to the project with the brief to rebuild the working relationship with Group IT and to design a practical update interface that could be deployed within the remaining timeframe.
Within the first working day onsite, with the full co-operation of the technical strand leader, Little Blue took the role of primary technical interface between the project and Group IT.
Within 3 working days onsite, a pragmatic analysis and lateral view of the current system design and inter-relations revealed a potential practical solution to achieving an automated update, through splicing into an existing interface between the transactional systems. This was worked-up into an outline technical proposal.
Within 5 working days onsite an initial meeting was held with the appropriate Group IT technical build manger and the overall IT project manager to introduce Little Blue, set out the outline build requirements and begin to achieve buy-in.
Through giving examples of similar builds from a first hand perspective and selling the non-enormity of the practical update solution envisaged, Group IT cautiously acknowledged that this approach could work and that a daily batch update process WOULD in theory be possible within the remaining timeframe.
Armed with the initial buy-in, increased technical credibility of the project team and therefore the dramatically increased propensity of Group IT to include the project team (Little Blue) in design discussions, Little Blue focused on gathering the project team's disparate thoughts into a consolidated functional specification for update data.
Within 10 days of Little Blue involvement in the project, the functional specification had become a technical specification, agreed with Group IT and the Little Blue role expanded into hands-on technical development management with the Group IT developers.
A keystone of the Little Blue strategy in rebuilding the Group IT relationship was to lever development buy-in through delivering the overall technical design via attainable "bite-size" pieces of functionality and expectation, backed by a credible and technically adept presence. Having achieved the initial Group IT buy-in on a daily batch update schedule, the implemented data interface operation was operational 3 months before launch and now runs on a near real-time basis as originally designed.
In addition to delivering a solution as originally briefed, Little Blue had an impact on the overall technical build of the Contact Centre. During the development of the data interface, the hands-on nature of the Little Blue approach and the detailed design of the data interface exposed inconsistencies in the front-end application design around address and data formatting which left unchecked would have rendered the incoming customer data unusable. The transactional systems were subsequently redesigned in the appropriate areas by Group IT to provide consistent data input.
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The Challenge
The Client, a successful and top tier facilities management company with a successful and high profile customer base, was aware that strong competitive pressure meant that FM was becoming more than just a case of "keeping the lifts clean". Looking for fresh ideas and inspiration, Little Blue was invited to look at the FM operation with a "fresh set of eyes" and suggest innovative improvements and additions to service, given our wealth of experience in outsourcing industries which was seen to be analagous to FM.
Little Blue proceeded to immerse ourselves in The Client experience by deploying a senior operational analyst to a flagship, although "facing challenges" site. The site selected was the head office of a media group, used as a shop window and physical demonstration of The Company's presentation and design skills, plus creative and efficient culture. The role of The FM Contractor was to maintain this multi storey and multi themed space in an immaculate and basically showroom condition, in an environment where the end customer was constantly aware of and actively monitoring the state of the "showroom".
Maintenance and cleaning operations were managed on both a planned/proactive and "as needed"/reactive basis, with the reactive tasks typically including tidy and clean-up operations following spills etc, plus remedial work due to planned tasks being missed or not performed to standard. The major challenge faced by The FM Contractor was keeping ahead of the customer in finding and dealing with the reactive issues BEFORE The Customer noticed and reported them......
During the short and intense period of initial situational analysis and
requirements gathering, it became apparent that The FM Contractor was constantly performing well in the "doing" aspect of the job, but was frequently being "caught out" by the client in finding "incidents" before The Contractor was aware of them. Also due to the 24/7 nature of the contract, it was difficult for the onsite supervisors to maintain quality standards across the teams, as substandard work would be dealt with by the following shift before the defect could be demonstrated to the "doing" shift. An initial Little Blue suggestion was to use digital photography to capture areas of substandard work, for later training use with the appropriate teams.
Attention focused on the requirement to monitor the building more frequently, to allow incidents to be noticed and dealt with more quickly. Deploying more supervisors was not an option, so a way to use the existing supervisors more efficiently was required. It became apparent quite early in the project that the supervisors spent a lot of time at their desks, dealing with administration rather than monitoring the building. After further analysis it was found that the supervisors were dealing with general administration, which could be dealt with by the centralised administration team. Site specific administration largely revolved around entering survey information, from paper based clipboard survey sheets, into excel worksheets and then distributing these to the appropriate client representatives.
A number of standard surveys (6) were used and each storey (7) of the building needed each of the 6 surveys. Each survey would take an average of 6 minutes to perform, giving a per floor survey time of circa 30-35 minutes. Given the manual nature of the paper to PC translation, each survey took, on average, a further 8 minutes to enter, update the master worksheet and distribute, giving an additional average per floor survey time of 45-55 minutes. Based on these timings, a supervisor could survey a maximum of 5 floors per 8 hour shift, assuming no other workload items.
The Solution
During informal discussions with The Supervisors, Little Blue suggested the use of handheld or PDA devices to improve the efficiency of performing the surveys and more significantly, dramatically improving the upload times of the survey data to a centralised repository. This would allow The Supervisors more "wander time" to walk the floors and basically, do their job..... The Supervisors enthusiastically embraced this idea and following the successful presentation of the idea to management, The Customer requested that we design, pilot and implement a new operational system which would free up the time of both site managers and
central operations, whilst providing clear and timely information.
Although very experienced in software design and development on Windows and Web platforms, Little Blue had not developed for Windows Mobile before. Using our development experience and following identification of appropriate platform programming tools, Little Blue produced pilot examples of 3 selected surveys, which included replication of the existing survey items, drop down status lists, scoring and Yes/No responses, free text entry and on screen help. Following initial feedback from The Supervisors, an additional defect capture module was added, linked to The PDA onboard camera allowing photographs of the defect/substandard cleaning to be taken and linked with the defect report. Following the successful pilot of the initial surveys and Defect reporting, the specification was worked up for the centralised reporting application. Written in Microsoft ASP based on a SQL Server database, the centralised application is fed from Visual Basic Windows Service applications running on The Supervisor PCs, which detect when The PDA is docked.
The remaining surveys were digitised and The PDAs rolled out to The Supervisors. Minimal training was required over and above basic PDA use. View access was given to the end customer, allowing them to view and monitor the survey information, simultaneously with The FM Contractor team.
The Result
User perception of The FM Contractor was immediately raised when the clipboards were replaced by PDAs and The Supervisors also enjoyed and appreciated the new tools of their trade. A recent study showed that site supervisors are now spending around 95% less time on survey and monitoring administrative duties, meaning they can spend much more wander and customer-facing time. The number of surveys that can be completed and reported upon in an 8 hour shift, has jumped to 15 from 5, greatly improving response time and the reporting and actioning of unexpected incidents. This performance increase has allowed The Client to reduce the amount of supervisor staff, whilst still seeing improved monitoring activity.
The web reporting application has allowed quality levels to be monitored quickly, efficient and by any authorised user with a web connection. Central consolidation of reported defects and work requests, including photographic evidence and detail of each case, has allowed contractors and work teams to arrive at the problem site, already appraised and equipped for the problem they're about to encounter. A future option is to tie in the trouble ticket application, with outsourced contractors' job booking systems to further reduce response times.
Due to the success of the initial rollout, the survey and work request applications have been rolled out across other customer sites with unanimous staff acceptance and improved customer perception. Again, due to the success of this initiative, the digitised survey and work request application is now used as a central theme, during new and repeat business sales presentations.
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