When we visit our customers we often talk about how they can cut down paper usage, go paper-light, potentially even paperless. Here at Xenith, we understand that the business world is moving to become more digital and that paper isn’t the answer moving forward.

However, what we don't often talk about is our own digital transformation journey.

Take, for example, the information presented at customer review meetings. We do these meetings on a regular basis to understand their new customer challenges and report on the results & benefits delivered.

Until recently, we used printed management information booklets, created by extracting information from our MPS systems. These A3 booklets contain all the reporting and information over a given period on that account. They’re very in depth and it tell the client everything they want and need to know. But at the end of the day, they are static reports that can get a little boring to look at. They’re still paper, and they still need to be read and explained.

Before you start to think this is a story about customer satisfaction, it’s not, it’s a story of digital transformation, led by some of forward-thinking team members.

We strive to help our customers become more efficient through digital transformation and to some extent, we forgot about our own processes - It’s easily done when you’re concentrating on customers.

It was time for change

In the same way that many digital transformation strategies start with a trigger, ours did too.

Our Client Relations Executives were spending hours pulling data from different tools with a very limited amount of control. As mentioned - this was not efficient.

The issue was aggravated by the fact that customers would sometimes ask for a different data set or timeline of data after the work had already been put in place and the statistics were printed.

To add insult to injury, the data we had was mostly working with the month in the past as this is what the Client Relations Executives has access to. Not to mention that most of our customers now have the technology for us to put our laptop up onto the screen rather than use paper.

Introducing service analytics

In an attempt to move our service offering forward, we decided to digitise a key back office process - management information reports.

To do so, our service delivery and helpdesk team started working on something great - Xenith’s new service analytics tool.

The new project was led by Natasha Evans (Senior Client Relations Executive) and Laura Olley (Helpdesk Manager) who explained that “Service analytics is our new in-house tool that gives us the flexibility to view a lot more information about all of our clients, and get a real understanding of what’s going on.”

Compared to the management information reports we previously used, where we could show graphs and data but it would be down to the Client Relations Executives to read through all the data, this is a lot more granular. Rather than just being data that we explain, it’s quantified and it’s all there to see.

We can take the customer on a journey from looking at an overview of the machines to seeing the machines doing a lot of volume vs machines that have got more problems, and it can be interactive in a meeting.

Just as importantly, the new tool is making our processes more efficient, faster and gives our client relationship and account management teams more time to work on higher-value tasks that really benefit the customers.

The benefits of digitalising the management information reports process

Whilst the aim was to bring our reporting up to speed with the digital world and allow for our Client Relations Executives to gain time back and improve their process of reporting, there are a number of benefits gained by implementing service analytics:

• The help-desk have more visibility when helping customers
• Customers see real-time data in meetings
• It’s digital and easy to use
• It saves time for client relations executives to do higher-value tasks
• The advice given to customers is based on real-time data, not the past
• Customers can scrutinise the data in meetings and we can give the answers straight away
• It’s interactive
• It’s efficient

Above all, it just makes us a bit more versatile and it gives us more information we can show our clients and we can actually change the format of the meetings.

It gives the Client Relations Executives a lot more time back. It’s also a lot more visual and as mentioned, interactive.

It’s about fitting in with the times. In this sense, we’ve got to be ahead of everyone else. It’s a competitive market.

Really, it’s just Xenith practicing what we preach; digital transformation.