case studies
Financial Services
Business Design - Customer Contact Centres
- Client
- Leading UK Water Utility
- Sector
- Financial Services
Project description
The Customer Relations division of a major utility was moving to a business model in which high volume tasks were handled by a ‘Front Office’ Customer Contact function with more time consuming and complex tasks being handled by ‘Back Office’ specialist functions. This was a substantial operation, receiving some 2.5 million telephone calls per year, and 750,000 items of mail. The operations included billing and mission critical asset management.
The utility was highly skilled in running large asset replacement projects, but had little experience of developing business change programmes of this kind. Two consultants from Chaucer Consulting supported a client team of 7 staff to complete:
- A Business Design for Customer Relations
This involved developing outline Business and Operational processes, and designing alternative business solutions to achieve the new design. A number of options were developed, one of which took advantage of new call centre technologies, and another which required no substantial IT development at all. - Business Requirements of revised technology
Having designed the business solutions, Chaucer then created a detailed business requirement of the technology support. - The Proposal and Business Case
Finally, a proposal and recommendations were produced together with a supporting business case. This proposal documented the range of alternative options, together with cost benefit statements for each of them.
Outcome
The proposal was presented to the executive for approval and the recommended (low technology) option was accepted and implemented.
