We began a partnership with a London based client who had a passion for their customers. Our client helps their customers through very stressful times in which they have to carefully and skillfully work each customer case through to completion, with a variety of possible outcomes and legislation to navigate.
They are a well established firm with a vision for new and innovative ways to improve their customer journeys, but with some significant technical challenges to overcome. In particular, their Case Management System (CMS), was significantly showing its age.
We’ve done a number of pieces of work with this client already, but for this case study I want to talk about something small. Small, yet important, and with a clear ROI. In many ways my favourite type of project!
Our client’s customers are often very keen to know what’s going on with their cases, I would be too and our client has an excellent call-centre with lovely staff who do a fantastic job. That being said, most of the time it’s not a good use of anyone’s time to provide a simple status update over the phone, customers have to go through security, and then chat with the call centre about their case.
Don’t get me wrong, a personal conversation is always good, but giving customers a simple, secure, straightforward way for them to get a status overview of their case would allow them to self-serve the information, and choose whether or not to pick up the phone.
Our client’s goals for this project were simple – keep call centre staff free for those customers who do need to speak to someone, by providing customers with on demand visibility of their case as it progresses. Happy customers, lower call volume, and better utilisation of the call centre. Everyone wins!
Our journey with this client started, as many do, with a referral. Another of our clients had a relationship with them, and recommended us to help them. The client that referred us loved how we communicated with them; we’re straight talking (no BS), and as we frequently go above and beyond for them too, they were confident we always had their best interests in mind and so they didn’t hesitate to recommend us.
Our client was talking with several suppliers, but our honest and open approach, combined with things like our bug free guarantee gave them the confidence to trust us with their work. Our client was happy to let us prove ourselves, with the extra piece of mind that they were saving time and money using our tried and tested SeriouslyRAD Framework – meaning that unlike other suppliers, they weren’t paying us to start their projects from scratch.
We love our client’s reactions to our first pieces of work with them, we get the warm and fuzzy feeling when we’ve started solving their problems – the proof is in the pudding as they say!
This is where things get fun, solving client’s problems! By this point in our partnership with our client, we had taken the time to understand their legacy CMS. While this CMS did have a centralised database, each user had to run their own copy of the application, which used the central database. No modern web application here, and plenty of issues and problems.
We had to first think about how our client’s customers would authenticate with the solution. We didn’t want to go down the route of a new type of user account for the customers to keep track of (at this point), so we started with what data we did have. We have the customer’s email address, and mobile number. The customer also knows these (of course), but the customer also knows their unique case reference.
Time for a bit of threat modelling. We looked at a number of different possibilities, and came to the conclusion that the status information to be shared could be protected by asking customers to provide their case number, for us to send them a short-lived code by text message, which they could then enter to access their information. This requires two factors for authentication – something the user has (access to the known mobile number), and something the user knows (their case reference). That was that problem solved. Next up, getting the data from the legacy CMS system…
As part of their path away from this legacy system, we had started building a modern API which could sit in between the CMS’ database and other more modern applications. This had to be secure in itself, and where necessary, replicate some of the hard-coded business logic that existed within the CMS thick client application.
So the easy answer would be to add the necessary functionality to the nice new modern API. That just leaves how we present it to the users, where do they go to get access?
A new modern lightweight web application to be hosted within our client’s cloud estate. That’s the easy bit!
We then look at the security and business rules that would apply to the architecture we’ve just come up with. We discussed and selected a third party to handle the SMS delivery. Add a sprinkle of security controls, a dash of business rule documentation, and we have a plan. More importantly – we also have a fixed price for the implementation
Let’s recap. Following our three step process we;
Something I’m fond of talking with clients about, is how are they measuring success, and what is the Return on Investment (ROI) they are after? So much so in fact that I’ve recently written a guide about “Measuring the ROI of your Software Investment”. It’s important to note that; not all ROI is tangible. This project delivers both the tangible and intangible types of ROI.
Intangibly, customer perceptions of our client will start to shift. Having a nice modern and secure mechanism for allowing them to see the status of their cases will generate a positive impression, as will not having to wait in a queue to speak to a call centre team. It might even make the difference between being satisfied, and dissatisfied overall. I said that was intangible, but to be fair it could potentially be measured through customer feedback and other things. Regardless, an increase in satisfaction represents a great return on investment for our client.
Tangibly, and measurably, we can look at call centre call volumes. We can even offset the measurable gains made against the cost of development and running costs of the solution (some hosting costs, and SMS costs). So a call centre data showing a reduction in overall call volume and an increase in average call duration? That would indicate that customers are calling less about “quick” things, and the calls that are coming through would be the more genuinely needed conversations.
Our client wanted to provide their customers with the ability to securely self-serve information updates on how their case is progressing without the necessity of phoning the call centre. Our solution worked to integrate with their legacy Case Management System, and securely provide the information to the customers. At the same time usage statistics of both the new solution and the call centre enabled tangible measurements of ROI to be made. Customer satisfaction will take longer to get a measure on, but customers with an increased choice of how to access information are likely to be happy customers.
If you can think of an operational friction point within your own organisation, reach out! You’ll have a friendly and informal conversation where you’ll get an honest and experienced take on your situation and problem. How much could you save by removing friction points? What would it do for your business to have customers interacting with you using modern, slick and secure technology?