What is Technology Consulting?
Customer Science’s Technology Consulting is committed to improving your customer, end user, technology team and executives experience. This promise is delivered by effective outsourcing, service optimisation and transformation, and most importantly, meaningful balanced scorecard reporting for senior management. These services are illustrated below:
What are the benefits of Technology Consulting?
The top benefits realised by our customers:
- Clear technology vision that can practically be enabled
- Improving business productivity and accuracy while reducing risk
- Technology platform that provides an agile, sustainability, consistency, compliant and secure services
- Customer, end user and leadership satisfaction
- Optimising IT performance of inhouse, outsourced and partners
- Actionable reporting of IT end-to-end performance
How can Customer Science help you?
Customer Science takes the risk out of Technology Consulting with industry leaders who apply unique staged consulting processes, that provide you:
- Control: with each stage confirming scope before proceeding & go/no go gates
- Efficient Investment: with minimum cost up front and proven return on investment
- Guaranteed Performance: with each step tested against agreed success measures
Our technology consulting team is made up of practical hands on leaders, each with over two decades of experience. Each have been either a lead outsourcer, company technology services leader or have lead large-scale technology transformation projects. Bringing this team together provides a unique perspective that blends best practices while motivating the team collectively to perform. You take the central role in this group to build a personalised solution.
Outsource & Partner Management Specialist
With companies needing to ensure every dollar spent returns the highest value to the business, one area you may be struggling to come to grips with is the value of your IT spend. IT departments for most businesses in Australia cost between 2% and 5% of revenue. A significant part of this cost will be spent on IT supply contracts such as cloud services, telecommunications services, computer equipment, software licences and specialist contractor services.
The primary focus of most IT departments is getting the right technologies in place to provide a platform for their company to conduct business. Their expertise is naturally concentrated in managing technical matters. What many IT departments lack is sufficient commercial expertise to negotiate terms and conditions in IT supply contracts, and subsequently manage vendor performance.
A recent growing trend is for large IT departments to employ senior IT specialists with the skills to manage the selection and on-going relationship with vendors. They recognise that commercial expertise in an IT department can generate real bottom line benefits many times the cost of the role.
- Are you are getting maximum value from your spend on IT-related products and services?
- Are your IT suppliers delivering all the benefits specified in their contracts or expected by your customers, users or leadership?
- If not, what can you do about it?
If your IT department doesn’t have capacity or capability to answer these questions we can help. We can provide advice on the approaches to addressing your particular IT supply performance issues. We can also work directly with your team to implement your preferred approach or review the outcomes of the work your team performs.
If you are concerned about whether or not you are getting the most from your IT supply, consider our IT Vendor Diagnostic service that delivers:
- A Summary, by contract, showing benefits to be delivered
- Assessment of each vendor’s performance in delivering the benefits
- Recommendations for improving the value-add from each contract
A Case Study: Benefits Realised for Broadspectrum
The Situation
Broadspectrum needed their IT Vendor to perform. End users had given up calling the service desk creating business risk, inefficiency as well as both staff and customer dissatisfaction. This was counter to the outsourcer’s view who was showing green SLA’s and while committing to continuous improvement this was not having an impact on user experience. The Broadspectrum technology leadership team lacked the right level of reporting and governance to understand the issue and take relevant action. Both the outsourcer and Broadspectrum were becoming increasingly frustrated.
The Solution
Customer Science, reviewed performance and built a plan to optimise performance. Initially:
- Reviewing outsource agreements
- Assessing accuracy and appropriateness
- Recommending changes to the SLA’s to meet business needs
The new SLA’s transitioned from transaction to outcome focused, business impact for failed SLA’s, end to end SLA’s reflecting the user experience and creation of a new balanced scorecard and governance approach.
The solution was built into a plan and implemented in collaboration with the outsourcer and Broadspectrum.
The Outcomes
- Meaningful Success Measures: 88 SLA’s reduced to 22 SLA’s and a top 5 competency measure used at the Executive level
- Confidence in performance with SLA’s clearly defined, agreed, benchmarked and tested for accuracy
- Actionable Measures: Improvement process built to support SLA optimisation
- Sustainable: Training and coaching provided to embed the new SLA’s
- Satisfaction: End User, Leadership and outsourcer satisfaction increased
Broadspectrum has since re-employed Customer Science to replicate this service for another performing outsource and provide a regular review service.
Whether you're thinking of outsourcing, insourcing or perhaps looking to transform your technology strategy, Customer Science can help. Contact James or read his bio here.
Customer Science is a customer experience transformation company.
We specialise in designing and operationalising your customer experience objectives.
