Case Study: Mitie
Highlights
- Centralised CRM system enables proactive account management by providing a single, integrated view of customers.
- Rapid implementation of a customer support centre with CRM integration improved customer service while reducing costs.
- Performance monitoring tools helped quickly identify issues meeting service level commitments, allowing for faster response times.
- Collaborating with ServerSys shaped Mitie’s vision for customised solutions that align with strategic objectives.
- Automated surveys improve customer satisfaction by identifying and resolving service issues quickly.
Who are Mitie?
Mitie Cleaning is a UK-based service company that provides cleaning services to clients in public and private sectors. It specialises in complex environments like power stations, airports, hospitals, and iconic landmarks. Mitie also caters to the cleaning needs of high street branches of retailers and banks. The management and staff of MITIE own approximately 25% of the company’s share capital. MITIE (Management Incentive Through Investment Equity) was founded by David Telling in 1987 and today MITIE Group PLC, of which MITIE Cleaning is a major discipline, employs around 32,000 people across the UK.
The Challenge
Mitie wanted to monitor its national accounts more effectively to gain a complete view of its customers.
However, the company’s regional operating model made it challenging to assess service performance consistently across the business. Each region managed its own customer contacts, which meant that assessing service performance required a time-consuming manual collation of spreadsheets and monthly customer satisfaction questionnaires. The reliance on paper-based reports and regional Act! CRM databases also made it difficult to monitor prestigious national accounts in a timely and effective manner.
Mark Hazelwood, Operations Director, Miworld at Mitie explains the challenge, “Our objective was to increase individual contract profitability by improving operational efficiency. Using enhanced customer relationship management would enable us to initiate proactive customer interventions, which in turn would leverage improved contract retention rates.
“By automating our customer survey process, we could monitor, escalate and respond to service performance issues and provide incisive reporting for regional managers. While we knew we had a deficiency in CRM, the investment involved – including the cultural change of moving to an account-based model -meant we needed to initiate functionality in a phased manner, introducing new business practices as and when the business was ready for them.”
The Solution
Scoping Mitie’s system requirements was challenging. They sought an experienced partner to shape a platform supporting their business vision.
“From the start, ServerSys impressed us with their ‘can do, will do’ attitude. We outlined the core functionality we required – a centralised customer database to drive key CRM initiatives and operational performance reporting for the business. We needed a system that could tick several boxes,” says Hazelwood.
The initial specification process was crucial for Mitie to achieve its long-term objectives. ServerSys closely collaborated with the IT team to define the database structure, refine data capture parameters, and undertake the system design process.
“ServerSys invested time in learning our business, mapping every process and getting to the heart of our operations,” confirms Mark. “They also shared with us best practice recommendations that ultimately helped to characterise our customer-centric vision.”
ServerSys recommended a CRM solution to address four primary areas: web delivery, remote access, scalability and price.
Mark continues, “Along with the adaptability to support a changing business model, their solution met another key requirement. It would alleviate the support burden on our IT department — essential as our distributed end-user base has a huge variance in IT literacy levels.”
Implementation and configuration of the new CRM system went smoothly. ServerSys took just days to populate the central customer database, importing and cleansing data from an array of disbursed repositories. This enabled Mitie to use the new CRM system to quickly survey more than 1,000 account customer contacts every month.
The move to automated customer surveys and digital performance management generated significant gains.
Mark Hazelwood explains, “In our initial Midlands regional trial we were able to identify customer issues and respond in just 48 hours – something that previously could have taken weeks. Customers were extremely positive about our inclusive approach – indeed, it’s proved to be a real competitive differentiator.”
Automating the customer perception survey process eliminated a significant administrative burden, freeing up account managers to focus on more strategic activities. Additionally, a rules-based escalation process was implemented to quickly respond to customer concerns and issues.
“We now have accurate and timely performance reporting across the business,” confirms Mark.
“Our CRM gives us powerful tools to leverage improved responsiveness to customers and gain early indications of SLA issues. For the first time, we have a national measure of global customer satisfaction and operational performance.”
The next challenge
Relocating the customer support centre from Scotland to Bristol was the next challenge for ServerSys.
Within a tight deadline of just six weeks, Mitie wanted to replace their legacy stand-alone system with a new integrated solution that would help them strengthen their proactive management culture and provide a unified view of their customers. The new system needed to flag any issues with customer SLAs and escalate them to regional managers for prompt resolution.
“We bombarded ServerSys with ideas which they took in their stride. In just weeks they configured a fully integrated call centre solution using the core functionality within our CRM,” reveals Mark.
“From automatic call recognition to pre-formatted email imports which remove the need for agents to re-key information, to escalations and real-time call centre performance reporting, ServerSys helped ensure every aspect of any customer interaction became a value-add.”
Using its CRM system, Mitie can now provide an out-of-hours service in the customer support centre. ServerSys created an interface so CRM data can be exported with ease.
“Outsourcing this function alone represents a £60,000 annual saving for the company,” states Hazelwood.
“The business has undergone a massive change in an extremely short time frame. But the collaborative and fully accountable approach adopted by ServerSys made the evolution to a new platform painless while helping us drive forward with our new business model.”, concludes Mark Hazelwood.
Next Steps
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