Industry news

Oxford City Council has gone to tender for a maximum of seven ICT infrastructure service providers to start in 2016 when their existing contract with a neighbouring authority expires next April. The contracts are valued between £5m and £13m and are to include data centre hosting, database administration, server storage and support, IT service management tools and service desk operations. Suppliers need to submit their interest by February 9th with a bidders event on January 20th at Oxford Town Hall.

Birmingham City Council advised to outsource

Xchanging Procurement has signed a new deal with Brambles to help strengthen its procurement capabilities. Brambles serves dry grocery, fresh food, retail and general manufacturing supply chains in over 50 countries and they specialise in pooling unit-load equipment and the provision of associated services. The three and a half year contract includes a co-sourcing agreement to help integrate procurement processes in Brambles across six global regions.

The Jockey Club launches procurement and outsourcing services

TNT UK has moved to a cloud based contact centre system and has signed a two year contract for use of NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld for Service. The aim is to improve its customer service and deliver their operations more efficiently. Since the new system has been in place, the logistics and international parcel delivery company, has already reduced average handling times and customer satisfaction has increased. NewVoiceMedia’s technology integrates with salesforce which allows all customer agents to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time supporting their customers.

Infosys reportedly wins a $98 million contract with TNT

According to The Times of India, analysts are forecasting moderate growth by IT players for the quarter ended December 2014.

Edelweiss (brokerage firm) forecasts growth of 0.8-1.5% for the top four IT players in the December quarter.

Tech Mahindra is their top pick with a 2% growth forecast followed by Infosys and HCL Technologies (HCL Tech) with around 1.5% growth and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) posting 1% growth and Wipro likely to clock a 0.8% growth.

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HCL win global IT infrastructure in outsourcing deal with De Beers

With budget cuts of £148 million, the authority is set to outsource a considerable amount of services to privately operated social enterprises free to compete with others for council services.

This could see a reduction in the council workforce from 4,000 to 150 people. Most of the current employees would transfer across to new service providers. The core 150 staff that would remain, would include those working in business intelligence and market development teams.

The new service model would see the creation of four new separate ‘mutual’ organisations over the next five years which will be employed by the council to deliver for the county.

Birmingham City Council advised to outsource

Firstsource Solutions is creating 40 new jobs in their Fountain Court call centre in Middlesbrough after winning a major telecoms contract. Recruitment will be for sales advisor positions to provide in and out bound sales call for their new client. The global outsourcing company which is headquartered in India has clients including Barclaycard and Sky.

Sitel creating up to 600 new jobs in Coventry

An investigation has found five government departments have awarded Serco and G4S 14 pieces of additional work worth £350m during their probation periods which ended in February for Serco and April for G4S.

The probation was understood to have banned Serco and G4S from winning any new government work until after both companies had undertaken a period of “corporate renewal” for overcharging on electronic monitoring contract.

The additional work that was awarded to the two outsourcing giants was clearly communicated to parliament. The government have now been accused of miscommunicating the idea that all new work was on hold until after the review. Both G4S and Serco remain under investigation.

Serco pulls out of managing Mansfield District Council town’s leisure services

With many business-to-business (B2B) organisations still taking stock after one of the hardest hitting recessions, establishing a strong customer base is high on the agenda.

It is becoming increasingly hard to both win new customers and retain existing ones. One reason for this is that the recession propelled customers to break the ties of old loyalties in search of lower prices and better deals.

This is not a revelation; however that said it isn’t all about price. B2B customers have been influenced by big-spending consumer brands who, despite the recession, have continued to drive loyalty programmes and invest in their ability to provide personal service based on data driven customer segmentation. Our customers have had their expectations raised.

As with everything in life, there is always good news and bad news. The good news is a competitive war of attrition on price is the only battleground that can be averted. The bad news is there is still a lot of work to be done in order to get your customer experience where it needs to be.

Our approach on how B2B companies can hold on to customers and maximise their value is simple; Get Personal, Get Smart.

Get Personal

There are two reasons for getting personal with customers. First, because they expect it of you and secondly, when you know who your customers are you can sell to them more effectively.

A problem the industry has is that rather than not knowing enough about customers, it knows too much. Information captured for customer interactions can be turned into valuable insights, allowing for a more tailored, personalised approach to selling.

It is vital that every piece of customer information is collated in one place allowing for dissemination of data. This process also allows us to start getting personal. We will now be able to see how much and how often the customer spends as well as pre-empting what they may purchase in the future. Being able to predict what customers might do allows us to plan strategies for the next best action to take.

These strategies are designed to address the three issues that matter to us most:

• Revenue – presenting the ideal sales offer at the perfect time

• Retention – anticipating defection and taking action to prevent it

• Efficiency – reducing unnecessary contacts and driving routine enquiries to lower cost channels

Having developed the ability to predict customer behaviour, the next challenge is to act upon it. This can be done using analytic technology vendors or using basic maths to calculate the best upsell offer for that customer.

Get Smart

Considering which channels to use in order to service customers at the lowest rate to the business is advisable. Whilst telephone agents can serve customers more cost effectively than on the road account managers, self-service multi-channels can serve them better still. Multi-channel shoppers will spend, on average, 15 to 30 per cent more than single channel shoppers.

However, providing service and sales over multiple channels is only the first step. The second is to link those channels together so that customers can move effortlessly from one to the other, or even use several to complete a single transaction. We call this omni-channel engagement, where multiple channels are integrated to deliver consistent and personalised customer experiences. Omni-channel shoppers out-spend multi-channel shoppers by a further 20 per cent.

Although there is a choice between implementing a single, multi and omni-channel sales model, it is evident that omni-channel is the most profitable and perhaps the most fitting in this day and age.

Trevor Harvey, Director of Planning at Saatchi & Saatichi considers developing an omni-channel strategy a necessity. He says: “If a company doesn’t [develop an omni-channel strategy] it will die. In today’s ‘participation economy’, a brand or business that deliberately chooses not to engage with its audience by their preferred methods of interaction chooses not to interact with them at all.”

Summary

The delivery of personal service, sales and account management across integrated voice and digital channels is, without question, the direction of travel for B2C organisations. On the basis that your customers expect you to deliver a ‘consumer-like’ experience, it surely has to be so for B2B organisations, too. It is a journey that won’t be achieved in a day but, in a world where customers have choice and the disposition to exercise it, it is one you must set out upon and the sooner the better.

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As business process outsourcing (BPO) moves up the value chain, focusing more on delivering strategic business impact rather than simply reducing costs, analytics have become critical components to deliver this increased value.

BPO providers and their clients are sitting on huge volumes of transactional data, amassed from their day-to-day operations. The ability to deploy analytics to extract usable insights from this data is a differentiator, helping to generate new kinds of business outcomes – outcomes not traditionally associated with BPO. These can range from accelerated speed to market and stronger customer loyalty to savvier talent management and top-line growth.

The value of analytics

Analytics can provide a single source of high-quality data about the performance of a process or function—data that is measured and recorded consistently. By analyzing a process’s or function’s end-to-end performance and discovering inefficiencies and risks, time and waste can be driven out. And managing data, from the front office, back office or both, can generate process innovations or improve time to market.

For instance, a health and life sciences company established an outsourced center for “pharmacovigilance” in order to better detect, assess and prevent adverse drug effects. The outsourced analytics capability enabled the company to collect and analyze data faster, shave time off the approval cycle, more easily identify drugs with no marketplace potential and get approved drugs to market faster.

As capabilities mature, analytics are moving beyond being descriptive in nature to being predictive. While descriptive analytics that provide standard and ad hoc reports and alerts help executives gain an immediate understanding of what is happening with their businesses, they describe what has already occurred. Advanced predictive analytics, on the other hand, provide a clear picture of what might happen in the near or even distant future. They provide statistical analysis, predictive modeling, forecasting and optimization to help clients anticipate—and plan for— likely scenarios.

Provider capabilities

While an outsourcing arrangement isn’t the only way to make business process analytics effective, the data and processes an outsourcing provider draws upon, using highly sophisticated tools and talent, is hard to duplicate using internal resources alone. With a view across entire industries and an intimate knowledge of their clients’ operations – including customers, global supply chains, business units and decision-making structures – outsourcing providers can use their analytics capabilities and acumen to drive better decision making, continuous operational improvements, enhanced product development processes and more profitable customer relationships.

Take as an example the finance function. Here, the provider has the ability to use leading-edge technologies to analyze invoices and other financial data, right down to individual line items. An accounts payable analytics tool may enable detailed transaction monitoring, automatically flagging some occurrences as duplicative or improperly documented invoices. Meanwhile, a procure-to-pay analytics tool may help shed light on the client’s working capital efficiency and process effectiveness.

It’s clear that analytics can empower clients to become more insightful decision-makers by providing key business performance information and identifying opportunities to address issues and improve business outcomes. As found in the highest performing BPO relationships, leveraging large volumes of data and analytical technologies alongside industry and functional knowledge has been shown to be an efficient route to driving new levels of insight and innovation that are essential for gaining—and sustaining—competitive advantage.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has gone to tender for a Service Integration and Management (SIAM) supplier. He contract estimated to be worth between £40m and £150m will last for 5 years with the option of extending for a further 2 years. This new tender is part of the MPS’s Total Technology Programme Infrastructure (TTPi), and the SIAM contract is the first to of a series to go to tender, the rest can be expected over the next six months.

Lockheed Martin wins Met Police Contract