Customer Experience in a Shared Services Environment
Innovation, Technology, Cloud, SLAs and KPIs, Standardised
– words you often hear in relation to Shared Services, but how often is
Customer Experience (CX) really given a top priority as opposed to a cursory
box ticking?
For Shared Services Connected Limited
(SSCL), a UK joint venture providing critical business support services for
Government departments, Police Services and Defence, this is absolutely at the
forefront of the Innovation and Improvement of the services we provide.
By working closely with our clients to
really understand their specific business needs and challenges SSCL has scanned
the industry for innovative and best of breed products to enhance the user
interaction with our services through our technology platform.
“We have been able to develop
innovative digital solutions with a primary focus on tailored services that enhance
customers’ experience, moving from a standardised Shared Services to Shared Services
your way
Clive Shepherd, head of SSCL Customer
Experience explains: “We touch the lives of over one million people through our
business services – that is an incredible number of people. Every month we are
handling the payroll for over 500,000 people from over 20 of the largest
Government departments and payroll is just a snapshot of the customer
interactions we have, so it’s absolutely critical for us to focus on our
end user
“And that’s exactly what we have done,
through taking an ‘outside in’ view of the services we provide, understanding
how users consume our services we are able to target both improvement and
innovation to continually develop the Customer Experience.
“Through a roadmap of innovation
focused on our end user, we have implemented and continue to develop new
platforms, dashboards and innovative products, all geared towards the end users
of our services. We are lucky enough to have like-minded clients who relish the
opportunity to really work collaboratively with us to develop services to meet
their ever more challenging current and future business needs.
“What’s more, listening to our clients,
through management meetings, user communities, End User Surveys (Net Promoter
Score, NPS) and using business analytics, we are really able to understand our
Clients’ businesses and users’ needs.
“CX really isn’t just about Contact
Centres although I see many articles that seem to think it is. It’s about an
organisational mind-set and each team understanding its part in providing a
great CX.
“Testament to our design is SSCL’s knowledge and
Insight management team within the Service Strategy and Innovation directorate.
Merging the knowledge management with the voice of the customer has been a
clear winner and recognised by Call Centre Management Association’s UK National
Contact Centre Awards where our team was awarded Gold for Best Customer Contact
Centre Team Support (colleague) category. I’m incredibly proud of the passion
demonstrated within my team, providing support to SSCL wide operational teams
(including the Contact Centre) and directly with our forward thinking clients,
enabling collaboration on CX impacting opportunities.
“Our approach provides a single CX Enhancement
interface to the client, ensuring that client user needs are clearly understood
and that the service we provide is in line with, or exceeds, the current
industry trends and expectation.
“Internally we also have an ongoing
schedule of Customer Experience workshops with our operational teams to ensure
awareness of the importance of CX in the delivery of our services.
“Externally, immersing ourselves in the client’s
organisation to work collaboratively with us ensure effective measures are in
place to be able to articulate levels of satisfaction and share feedback. We
can both celebrate the positives, use them as examples of ‘what good looks
like’, identify opportunities and put plans in place to improve where we can.
The challenges of CX
“Delivering a Shared Service has many
challenges from a CX perspective, especially in things like measurement of NPS
and really tracking down root causes of both positives and negatives.
“It’s not a typical Business to
Customer (B2C) environment as end users don’t really have a choice where they
get their services from, but their senior management do…..
“As a result it’s really important to
view the services provided as ‘End to End’ across client organisations and the
service provider, really focus on and value the end user experience. We know
that Client Execs have different drivers in terms of value for money and
strategy, so we are essentially working in a B2B2C environment keeping both
clients and end users satisfied. Their perception of the services delivered has
moved way beyond SLA and KPI performance; they’re a given, end user feedback
and satisfaction is a key factor. Again, we are lucky to have clients who
understand that. We work collaboratively with them to look at how we might help
internally in their organisations to ensure we get what we need to deliver a
great Customer Experience and they do the same with us.
“This summer we launched new dashboards
- myPay and
myTeampay, reacting to findings. Another step forward in
terms of SSCL co-designing a solution with users to improve Customer
Experience.
“It has vastly improved an employee’s
and line manager’s ability to self-serve for information that would have
previously involved many individual searches of pay impacting information, like
expenses, allowances, tax code changes, typically these queries could have
ended up being presented to SSCL as a service request or call.
“Feedback tells us it’s easy and intuitive and we
are now looking at other opportunities to do this elsewhere in our services.
What’s next?
We’re gearing up to launch the latest
version of our multi award-winning myHub – this started life around two years
ago essentially as a knowledge search tool but we have collaboratively
developed it to the point where, when Single Sign On (SSO) is delivered, it
will become the entry point to our services. Really simple to use, a great CX
and will replace our existing portal, simplifying access to our services with
any associated help and users’ frequently used transactions.
Forms, a word you wouldn’t expect to be
using in 2020, will really become a thing of the past in favour of digital
input. We have consolidated hundreds of organisational forms resulting in creating
12 key categories of digital data entry replacing 80% of previous form-based
interactions.
So why is CX so
important and what’s different about SSCL?
“Traditionally, a service or product
would be provided to end users and those users would need to use that product
to achieve their business outcomes, regardless of how clunky or difficult it
was - bringing the users to the service.
“At SSCL we believe we should take the
service to the users. We want to develop those services to meet their business
needs and SSCL’s Intelligent Ecosystem does just that.
“We will continue to use ‘outside in’
thinking, think differently about solutions, running design thinking workshops
with our clients to continue to develop and deliver our Innovation
roadmap.
“I’m finding it incredibly liberating
to be part of such a forward thinking CX centric organisation. Under Matt
Hurley’s leadership in the Service Strategy and Innovation division straddling
all SCCL’s business, we are making great strides forward in how we think about
what we are delivering……… and delivering it. It’s changing the organisation and
who knows, could help change the direction of the industry. Start to think
differently and put CX first…we do!”